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Milan, July 16, 2026 — The Maggioli Group’s e-procurement platform is the first in Italy to integrate the verification and direct monitoring services offered by Fideiussioni Digitali, the ecosystem developed by Surety Shield—a subsidiary of Cetif Advisory, a spin-off of the Research CenterUniversità Cattolica Università del Sacro Cuore, and backed by Banca Valsabbina and other institutional investors—for the digital management of the lifecycle of surety bonds using Blockchain technology. This integration enables the Appalti & Contratti E-Procurement Evo platform to further enhance the security and transparency of guarantees issued in the context of public procurement, thereby consolidating the Group’s path of innovation and digitization in the procurement sector.
This is a strategic and highly significant milestone, making the Maggioli Group the first in the e-procurement sector in Italy to adopt this type of solution.The Maggioli Group’s Procurement Division is the leading provider and market leader in Italy for contract management and public procurement, with approximately 1,100 public administrations actively using the Group’s IT solutions. The Maggioli Group operates in this sector throughthe integrated “Appalti&Contratti” ecosystem, a unique model on the market comprising the PAD-certified (Digital Procurement Platform – AgID) cloud platform Appalti&Contratti E-Procurement Evo, specialized training and consulting services to support procurement officers (RUPs) and the procurement offices of public entities, and the most authoritative and long-standing information sources and editorial databases in the sector.
Procurement & Contracts E-Procurement Evo enables contracting authorities to manage the entire procurement process—from planning through acceptance testing to reporting—with a modular structure adaptable to organizations of various sizes. Some features are based on artificial intelligence technologies integrated into the platform, such as the automatic extraction of relevant data from uploaded documents (generated during the daily activities of the Project Manager), while maintaining a manual validation step for the proposed data before its final entry into the database. Another feature is theability to generate summaries of procurement documents , thanks to a targeted synthesis of the documentation that allows users to work with often complex and voluminous documents, thereby reducing the risk of errors. The system is capable of detecting the presence of personal data in documents published for transparency purposes, thereby preventing the potential exposure of personal and/or sensitive data.
The public procurement sector in Italy has historically been vulnerable to the issue of fraudulent performance bonds, with companies submitting bonds that are counterfeit or issued by unauthorized entities. If the guarantee is found to be false and the company defaults, the public entity suffers immediate financial loss, for which the Sole Project Manager (RUP) may be held personally liable if they failed to perform the necessary verifications. Thanks to its integration with Fideiussioni Digitali, the E-Procurement Evo system queries the blockchain Shield blockchain in real time and returns a definitive authenticity result, drastically reducing verification times compared to traditional manual checks, which take an average of 2–3 days.
Thanks to this integration, contracting authorities and economic operators using Maggioli solutions will be able to directly access the functions for verifying surety bonds without interrupting the flow of the bidding process: an immediate verification process that simplifies checks, reduces processing times, and strengthens safeguards against the risk of inauthentic documentation, helping to combat the issue of false or counterfeit surety bonds.
“The agreement with Surety Shield represents a winning partnership with extremely high added value, capable of combining the Maggioli Group’s institutional authority and extensive reach with the cutting-edge technological expertise of a leading university spin-off,” says Paolo Maggioli, CEO and Chairman of the Group. “The adoption of the Digital Surety Bonds platform marks a significant milestone in the sector’s digital transformation, providing contracting authorities with advanced tools for Blockchain notarization, process traceability, and fraud prevention.” The Maggioli Group holds an exclusive agreement for the first year to distribute the technology integrated into digital procurement platforms, while Surety Shield gains access to a network of over 1,100 contracting authorities active on the Group’s platform, expanding its reach in the B2G market after having established a strong presence primarily in the banking and insurance sectors.
The agreement therefore marks a strategic step forward in the evolution of interoperability among digital platforms in the public procurement sector, and could serve as a model for the future integration of e-procurement systems with specialized verification and anti-fraud tools.
"The digitization of public procurement cannot be considered complete as long as a process as sensitive as the verification of surety bonds continues to rely on manual checks. The integration with Maggioli represents a concrete step toward a new operational model, in which interoperability, automation, and security work together to simplify the work of contracting authorities and strengthen trust in the entire bidding process," says Antonio Sorrentino, CEO and Co-Founder of Surety Shield.