Carlo De Sanctis and Anna Maria Bigoni are not only friends of Redpoint, but above all a young couple who have been working for years, with passion, in the development, sales, and consulting of modular solutions for the world of administration, finance, and control.
After several years abroad, they made the courageous decision to return “home” during the pandemic to launch the Italian branch of Amana, which later became part of the Lucanet Group. The German company provides software solutions for the efficiency of financial processes: from consolidated financial statements and planning to ESG processes, including disclosure management, XBRL, and lease contract management.
To interview them, we connected with the blue waters of the Adriatic Sea and the green hills of central Italy: Civitanova Marche.
Carlo, Anna Maria, you’re speaking to me from the Marche region, but I know you have a European background. What journey led you to Lucanet?
Carlo: It’s a rather unique story. I graduated in Economics and immediately started working in the Consolidated Financial Statements department of a large Italian company. But I had a dream: to gain experience abroad. So I decided to join my brother, who was living and working in Sweden. To do so, I turned down a permanent contract. Not only that: three months earlier I had met Anna Maria… timing wasn’t exactly perfect, but the decision had been made and there was no turning back.
In Sweden I studied the language and then found a job at a leading Scandinavian consulting firm. After just one week, they sent me to prepare the financial statements of a Swedish tech giant with five hundred companies to consolidate. In Sweden, young professionals are trusted and given real challenges – true opportunities. And if needed, a senior colleague supports you. The project moved forward successfully, even though I was the youngest and not a native speaker.
Anna Maria: Meanwhile, I completed my degree and moved to Sweden right away. I started working at what is now the ITA (Italian Trade Agency), which supports Italian companies entering Scandinavian and Baltic markets. It was a wonderful job, connecting small Italian artisanal businesses to large global markets. That’s where I developed my client-oriented approach, which is still at the heart of what I do today. In 2018, Carlo’s company was looking for new profiles and that’s how we became a team.
Carlo: Then Covid arrived. Partly due to the emergency situation, partly because we missed our families, we decided to return home right in the middle of lockdown. Since we had been working in finance technology for years, the idea was born to open the Italian branch of the German group Amana. In 2023, the group was acquired by Lucanet, a much larger company: today we are nearly 1,000 people worldwide, serving almost 7,000 clients.
It might seem natural to establish the Italian branch of an international group in a large city. Instead, you chose to base yourselves in the region where you were born and raised the Marche.
Carlo: We went abroad seeking opportunities that our local area couldn’t offer. After significant professional growth, we said: let’s build something back home. We have excellent universities here and many talented young people who feel forced to move to big cities or abroad. If they can find an interesting alternative “at zero kilometers,” why not? We try to apply what we learned abroad: that teamwork always wins, that different roles can coexist without rigid hierarchies, and that it’s possible to work toward objectives in a flexible and human-centered environment.
What market needs do you respond to?
Carlo: In some cases, we address regulatory requirements related to digital financial statements: clients come to us, after collecting their data, to manage and export it in electronic format. Other companies need to improve processes and timelines. For example, a company with 10–20 subsidiaries worldwide, operating in different currencies and using different ERP systems, faces exponential complexity when preparing consolidated financial statements with spreadsheets. Dedicated software that imports data and automatically performs consolidation entries and intercompany eliminations can be a real game changer.
Anna Maria: It’s an integrated process, tracked at multiple stages, with secure and controlled sharing. These are fairly complex solutions aimed at medium and large enterprises.
Your work gives you an external view of economic, social, political, and corporate trends. One of your solutions concerns ESG measurement. What have you observed in recent years?
Carlo: Over time, we’ve seen that initially everyone was scouting for expertise to better understand the regulations. Listed companies were immediately required to comply and adopted hybrid approaches, still largely manual. In the second year, there was a shift toward technological efficiency to cover the entire value chain data collection, emissions calculation, automated disclosure. Next year, I imagine the trend will move even further toward integrated solutions.
Most medium-to-large unlisted companies, which were initially expected to fall into the “second wave” of regulatory implementation and are now no longer obliged, have understandably paused. They are waiting for further developments to gain clarity. That said, a few “white flies” are continuing for various reasons: to remain compliant with investment funds or banks that have invested in them, or to maintain market competitiveness.
Anna Maria: Many were probably discouraged by the perception that the CSRD directive was not fully aligned with their size and operations.
What would you advise a company today regarding consolidated financial statements?
Carlo: We would recommend integrating the entire data flow. This ensures reliability not only internally but also externally for clients, banks, investors (current and potential), auditing firms, and more.
Anna Maria: Technology supports us. Ensuring that what is presented in financial statements is verified and secure is essential. Using dedicated software means data quality meets very high standards and leaves little room for error. Not to mention the speed of producing the document itself.
It reminds me – perhaps an extreme comparison of the technological leap from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance: from scribes copying manuscripts by hand, inevitably introducing errors, to the invention of the printing press, which made everything far more reliable.
Carlo: That’s a fitting analogy. We are committed to supporting clients in independently using the software. We provide consulting precisely to make these new tools accessible to everyone. And we position ourselves as a single provider: we can relate directly to companies because we developed the software in-house.
Anna Maria: Speaking of technological shifts, our solutions already include and will increasingly include AI functionalities to streamline work processes.
However, it remains essential to maintain the human component, which brings judgment and oversight to automated processes especially for complex tasks or highly strategic decisions.