Unipol Gruppo Finanziario S.p.A. is an Italian

Italy

Italy , officially the Italian Republic languages]] under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. In each of these, Italy's official name is as follows:;;;;;;;;), is a unitary parliamentary republic in South-Central Europe. To the north it borders France, Switzerland, Austria and...

 financial services

Financial services

Financial services refer to services provided by the finance industry. The finance industry encompasses a broad range of organizations that deal with the management of money. Among these organizations are credit unions, banks, credit card companies, insurance companies, consumer finance companies,...

 company operating principally in the insurance

Insurance

In law and economics, insurance is a form of risk management primarily used to hedge against the risk of a contingent, uncertain loss. Insurance is defined as the equitable transfer of the risk of a loss, from one entity to another, in exchange for payment. An insurer is a company selling the...

 sector, in which it is the country's fourth-largest firm. Based in Bologna

Bologna

Bologna is the capital city of Emilia-Romagna, in the Po Valley of Northern Italy. The city lies between the Po River and the Apennine Mountains, more specifically, between the Reno River and the Savena River. Bologna is a lively and cosmopolitan Italian college city, with spectacular history,...

, the company was founded in 1962 as a cooperative

Cooperative

A cooperative is a business organization owned and operated by a group of individuals for their mutual benefit...

 provider of non-life insurance

Life insurance

Life insurance is a contract between an insurance policy holder and an insurer, where the insurer promises to pay a designated beneficiary a sum of money upon the death of the insured person. Depending on the contract, other events such as terminal illness or critical illness may also trigger...

. After a failed takeover bid for Banca Nazionale del Lavoro

Banca Nazionale del Lavoro

Banca Nazionale del Lavoro SpA is an Italian banking firm. Founded in 1913 as Istituto di Credito per la Cooperazione, it was nationalized in 1929. It was re-privatized and listed on the Milan Stock Exchange in 1998, before being acquired by French banking group BNP Paribas in 2006...

 in 2005, Unipol saw its CEO Giovanni Consorte

Giovanni Consorte

Giovanni Consorte is an Italian manager. He graduated in chemical engineering at the University of Bologna in 1972 and headed Montedison from 1973 to 1975, then Lega delle Cooperative from 1976 to 1978. Since 1979 he worked in Unipol, of which he became President in 1996. He resigned on December...

 resign in the midst of the bancopoli

Bancopoli

Bancopoli was the name coined by the Italian press to identify the finance and banking scandals that played out for the Italian public between July 2005 and January 2006...

scandal. Consorte was later convicted for insider trading

Insider trading

Insider trading is the trading of a corporation's stock or other securities by individuals with potential access to non-public information about the company...

. Under Consorte's replacements Pierluigi Stefanini and Carlo Salvatori, the company underwent extensive restructuring

Restructuring

Restructuring is the corporate management term for the act of reorganizing the legal, ownership, operational, or other structures of a company for the purpose of making it more profitable, or better organized for its present needs...

in 2007.