In January 2019 a group of citizens decided to form a first FEDx Committee with the aim of preparing the projects and starting to send funding requests to the European Commission.

In order not to jeopardize the initiative, considering the European rules, which allow applications for funding to be submitted also by non-legal entities, the first general conditions for participation were created.

Everyone could participate and carve out their own role according to the added value provided for the development of the Direct European Funds Exchange, establishing that the founders of FEDx will be the subjects who will demonstrate the ability to present projects, obtain funding and implement funded projects. .

With this principle it was possible to safeguard FEDx and experiment with the rules for the functioning of the new financial market activated, also facing the limit of not having adequate financial resources available, as despite the possibility of capitalizing on the discoveries made, we could not limit ourselves to mere information, which becomes useless if not finalized also when obtaining the loan.

Furthermore, we had and have the priority to finance our projects, including the advanced development of FEDx, and to integrate them with the additional needs required by the European Direct Funds, or to create partnerships and involve any necessary recipients, with the constant that most some of the subjects are unaware of the existence of these direct non-repayable European funding lines, from 100% to 70%.

In fact, everyone is potentially interested in obtaining a 100% non-repayable European direct loan, but few understand the real added value of the FEDx Exchange and the opportunity encountered on their path, preferring to surrender to the first difficulties encountered, sometimes even due to the little effort in projects, but Europe does not give money, like all public bodies.

This led to an inevitable slowdown, while the deadlines arrived and we were unable to present even the projects already validated, as well as the additional ones to which we believed we were in a position to send a possible solution, also having to deal with the difficulty in acquiring and preparing of the administrative and technical documentation established by the European Commission.

In April 2019 we were able to present the first project, only to discover that it was possible to finance only 1 project, a very widespread financial index, as certified by the monitoring carried out.

The evaluation of this first project was very low, with the indication of the shortcomings, but the European Commission replied to us within the set times, encouraging us to continue along the path.

Despite the criticality of increasing the score, we realize that we have overcome the information problem, having created a methodology for the census of all the European Direct Funds for research and innovation, noting that with the methods used previously they had registered only 1/3 of the available loans, the value of the Stock Exchange for the year 2019, went from 1 billion to 3 billion euros.

We had reached the first intermediate goal, in August 2019 we present the second project and we measure ourselves with another recurring criticality, even a large Italian company, leader in its sector, is unprepared in preparing the necessary technical documentation.

The tight deadlines and the lack of knowledge of the European partner procedure do not allow us to involve the necessary partners and the project is considered inelegible, spurring us to present, in November 2019, a first request for funding for the development of the FEDx Exchange.

The third project presented in 2019 is considered inconsistent by the evaluators, who raise some observations on the merits in the evaluation report, considered unfounded by the FEDx project committee, so much so as to lodge an appeal, as required by the European procedure.

The answer arrives within the foreseen time frame, with the internal evaluation report, where we are informed that only 1 of the evaluators had raised the observations, but that the lack of operational capacity and other minor deficiencies, had in any case determined an insufficient score for the financing.

The first year of life of the FEDX European Direct Fund Exchange ends with the presentation of 3 projects, of which only 1 was evaluated with a score of 2.

We will all remember 2020 as the year of the Covid-19 pandemic, we will also remember the year of awareness on how to present projects and increase the score of the projects presented.

The greater knowledge of European procedures has allowed us to integrate the methodologies developed and to develop new ones, while we also had to modify the general operating conditions of the Exchange.

It took 2 years (2019-2020) to overcome the main criticalities, essentially attributable to the complete information and analysis of the Direct European Funds available, to the definition of the criteria to be used in the selection of funding and partners, to the preparation of projects.

The formal evaluations obtained in the projects presented confirmed an increase in the score up to the minimum threshold required for one parameter (3/5) and slightly less for the other two (2.5 / 3), for a total of 8 / 10.

For this reason, stricter conditions have been introduced, destined to become less and less flexible, for taking on new projects and participating as a Partner.

The availability of validated methodologies and tools made it possible to overcome many of the criticalities encountered and to develop new functions, which allow to guarantee the support scientific technician necessary for the activation of direct European funding in force.