11 July 2025
The thesis highlights how important it is for the Basque Country to have a developed financial center to drive Basque industrial transformation, especially in the context of the process of change that Europe is undergoing.
It also analyses the creation of BASQUEFIK, the Basque financial and investment cluster, an innovative response at the regional level aimed at strengthening the Basque Country's financial center and its links with other strategic clusters in the region.
Ibon Gil de San Vicente, director of projects and territorial impact at Orkestra, defended his doctoral thesis today, entitled: “Challenges and opportunities for peripheral local financial centres: Business financing and development policies in the Basque Country”, directed by Associate Professor Henar Alcalde Heras. The defense took place at the campus of the University of Deusto in San Sebastian, and culminates a research process focused on the role of local financial centers in peripheral industrialized regions, with the Basque Country as a case study, and carried out with the support of the Basque Institute of Finance.
The thesis, written in Spanish and comprising two articles published in English, offers an in-depth analysis of the Basque Country as an example of a territory in which business financing continues to be strongly conditioned by territorial factors. The study highlights how the increasing centralization of financial activity in large global centers has weakened local financial centers, with negative consequences for long-term investment, their transformative capacity and, ultimately, for territorial cohesion among European regions.
In this context, the thesis demonstrates that local financial centers are key for industrial companies to finance their growth and transformation. The Basque case allows the identification of 6 critical factors and 2 relevant pillars for their development. It also proposes a framework that helps manufacturing companies identify the organizational, commercial and financial aspects that help to finance innovative business models. Finally, it highlights that public-private collaboration, inspired by cluster logic, is a useful tool to align financial activity with the needs of the business fabric and to develop its local financial center.
The thesis highlights the importance of a developed financial center within the Basque Country to promote industrial transformation. This is particularly important given the ongoing changes in the European context and the need to channel financing to organizations that require it.
The panel, composed of Leire San José (UPV-EHU), Lidia Loban and Guillermo Badía, highlighted the originality of the research and underlined its transforming impact in the territory. They especially valued the fact that it is an innovative thesis with practical application, developed in close collaboration with a wide range of local agents, among which the Basque Institute of Finance stands out. In fact, one of the cases analyzed in depth is the process of creating BASQUEFIK, the Basque financial and investment cluster. This process stands out for being an innovative response at regional level and for constituting a policy aimed at strengthening the financial center of the Basque Country and strengthening its links with other strategic clusters in the territory.
With this dissertation, Ibon Gil de San Vicente contributes to the debate on regional economic policies and the need to strengthen local financial capacities for a more inclusive, rooted and sustainable development, in line with the structural challenges of the Basque economy.
Zorionak Ibon!
