With an increasingly wide range of product variants available to the public, product characteristics are now bundled together in an enormous variety of combinations. A “personal computer” is, in actuality, an amalgamation of computing speed, memory, networking capability, graphics capability, and so on.
Nevertheless, the cost-to- income ratio is still high (66 per cent) and the return on equity (5.7 per cent) remains lower than that which investors would require to subscribe newly-issued shares. This gap, which is also affected by the higher country risk, hinders both market access and efforts to strengthen the capital bases of Italian banks.