50th anniversary ICO
Working together, looking to the future
Since its creation in 1971, Instituto de Crédito Oficial (ICO) has worked to provide added value to the financing of the Spanish business network and respond flexibly to the needs and challenges created by different economic scenarios, all with the aim of contributing to the promotion of economic growth and job creation.
With this vocation, ICO currently carries out its activity in three different roles: national bank for business financing, instrument of economic policy and State financial agency.
Due to its triple role, ICO has played a significant role in exceptional economic situations over the past fifty years, such as the one generated by the COVID-19 health crisis.
It is currently managing various programmes on behalf of the State, including the Guarantee Second-Floor Facility. These programmes allow the mobilisation of a large quantity of resources thanks to public-private collaboration for companies and the self-employed. The Second-Floor Facility was launched in record time and has provided a total of 114,647 million euros of financing to the self-employed and Spanish companies between March and December 2020, to meet their liquidity needs. In this period, 944,588 loans were approved for a total of 591,535 companies, of which 99% were self-employed and SMEs.
The speed and efficiency in the deployment of the Guarantee Second-Floor Facility has been supported by the work carried out by ICO and the financial sector in recent years to pool resources to boost business financing, allowing public private consolidated collaboration systems in the current circumstances to exist. These systems have enabled the agile mobilisation of resources to support the liquidity and investment needs of the self-employed and companies.
At the same time, ICO has strengthened the different financing instruments that the Institute makes available to companies and made them more flexible, in order to promote the recovery process and the transition of the Spanish economy towards a more sustainable and digitalised growth model.