The Milan Entrepreneur Turning Cost-of-Living Pain Into an Investment Platform

Marco Feltri launched his micro-investment platform, Radici Finance, out of a co-working space on Via Muratori in February 2025 with seven employees and a pitch that seemed almost naively timed: teach working-class Milanese how to invest small amounts of money at the exact moment those people had the least cash to spare. Eighteen months later, the company has 34,000 registered users and processed over €9.2 million in transactions in the first half of 2026.

The timing, it turns out, was not naive. Eurostat data released in June showed Italian consumer prices up 3.8 percent year-on-year, with food and energy costs hitting households outside the city's wealthier northern districts — Brera, Porta Nuova — disproportionately hard. In Milan specifically, average monthly rent for a one-bedroom apartment crossed €1,650 in May, according to figures compiled by Idealista. Disposable income is thinning. The conventional financial advice — save more, invest the rest — is becoming mathematically harder for anyone earning a median Lombard salary of roughly €1,980 net per month.

Radici Finance was built for exactly that arithmetic. The app allows investments starting at €5, connects to any Italian bank account via open banking protocols, and uses a rounding-up feature that sweeps spare centesimi from daily card purchases into a diversified ETF portfolio. Feltri, who previously worked at Mediobanca's retail division in the Palazzo Mezzanotte building on Piazza degli Affari before striking out on his own, designed the product specifically after noticing that wealth management services consistently ignored clients with less than €50,000 to invest.

Local Roots, Real Numbers

The company operates from the Talent Garden campus in Viale Molise, one of Milan's better-known startup hubs, and has a satellite office near the Politecnico di Milano in the Città Studi district where it recruits data science graduates. Feltri signed a partnership in April with Fondazione Welfare Ambrosiano, the Milan-based organisation that provides financial support services to workers and low-income families in the metropolitan area, to offer Radici as a free tool through social assistance programmes. Around 4,200 of the platform's users came directly through that channel.

The numbers matter beyond the company's own growth story. The Bank of Italy's most recent financial literacy survey, published in October 2025, found that only 27 percent of Italians held any form of investment product outside of a traditional savings account or government postal bonds. In the 25-to-40 age bracket — Radici's core demographic — that figure drops to 22 percent. Feltri's bet is that the barrier is not appetite for risk but access to comprehensible, affordable entry points. His retention data appears to support the thesis: 71 percent of users who made their first investment in Q1 2026 were still active three months later, a figure he says exceeds industry benchmarks for digital investment platforms by roughly 15 percentage points.

What Comes Next for Milanese Savers

Radici Finance is currently in talks with two of Italy's mid-sized banking groups — neither has been officially named — about a potential white-label licensing deal that would embed the platform inside existing mobile banking apps. If successful, Feltri expects the user base to reach 150,000 by the end of 2027.

For ordinary Milanese trying to manage squeezed budgets right now, the practical options are narrowing. Mortgage costs have stabilised but not fallen after the European Central Bank's rate cycle. Supermarket staples at chains including Esselunga and Carrefour branches around Piazza Loreto and Corso Buenos Aires are running 6-to-9 percent above 2023 prices on basics like pasta and dairy. Financial advisers at Banca Mediolanum's Milan offices have publicly signalled clients to increase equity exposure as a hedge against persistent inflation — advice that, until recently, was practically meaningless for anyone without a substantial lump sum to start with.

The Radici Finance model does not solve the cost-of-living crisis. It does, however, offer a tangible on-ramp at a moment when doing nothing with disposable income — however little there is — carries its own long-term cost. Feltri has scheduled a public demo day at the BASE Milano cultural space on Via Bergognone for September 18th, open to any resident curious about starting with as little as a single five-euro note.