Our story

Alessandro Farina moves to Hungary, cutting his teeth at a renowned English consultancy firm. Its clients include industrial, trade, agricultural, and real estate companies.

In 1993, Xavier Defaÿsse started his career in Hungary as an auditor with Coopers & Lybrand and PriceWaterhouseCoopers until 2000.

He establishes the ITL Group and starts providing corporate services. The first slogan was “if you want to predict the future, you have to understand the present” and it became the guiding principle which encouraged the company’s growth in the following years

Salustro Reydel (now member of KPMG) opens a subsidiary in Hungary for the French speaking community and starts a bookkeeping practice which will be known later as Duna Expert. Duna Expert has joined ITL Group in 2021.

Partnership is established with the Lajos Law Firm, run by lawyer Levente Lajos. A good partner and true friend: clients received his complete support, and he shared the burden of numerous market challenges over the following years.

LLF website

ITL Accounting is established, making what once was an outsourced activity into an integral part of the ITL Group. The company makes a considerable investment in IT to guarantee high-quality services.

The company keeps growing. The ITL Group HQ is refurbished and expanded to welcome new staff. The group expands its managerial services for its clients, becoming a veritable one-stop shop.

The ITL Group establishes Kopernikusz, a non-profit organisation dedicated to developing training programmes and managing European Union tenders. It’s run by Barbara Ács (in 2016, the organisation was annexed to the Group and renamed ITL EU Finance).

The department provides communication, marketing, event planning, and market research services. Luigino Bottega heads the division, given his previous experience creating social communities and platforms in Italy

The ITL Group gains more experience and starts providing visual merchandising and training services to well-known retail chains. This leads to further work with international large-scale retail groups.

We continue growing… and the ITL Group moves its offices to the pedestrian zone of Váci utca 81 in Budapest (current location). With the move, all departments are now under one roof. Moreover, the company rebrands and gradually increases its range of services.

The website, in Italian language, provides information on the Hungarian economy. It has become the most read publication on the economic exchanges between the two countries. 

In 2010, we created the DATABASE OF THE ITALIAN COMPANIES which encompasses all of the active Italian companies within Hungary, with the intention of expanding our readers’ knowledge of the investment climate in the country. 

 http://aziende.itlgroup.eu/

Together with Dóra Szeles, an auditor who gained considerable experience at other international companies, ITL Audit was born. The department mainly implements audits and transfer pricing services.

The department focuses on research, staffing selection and provision as well as other HR services. The client list soon grows to include renowned multinational companies.

ITL HR Solutions website

The ITL Group launches “Budapest Business Party”, a yearly event targeting the international business scene in Budapest. Its resounding success makes it a go-to event in the following years, with attendance constantly skyrocketing!

BBP website

Alessandro Farina is awarded the grade of Officer of the Order of Merit of the Italian Republic for his “role in stimulating economic and business exchanges between Hungary and Italy.”. That same year, the ITL Group started its outreach programme, assisting Italian citizens residing in Hungary with matters relating to INPS, the Italian National Social Insurance Agency.

ITL Real Estate is established! Our experts are responsible for signing framework agreements with various credit institutions and assisting them in the divestment of non-performing assets, auditing line of credits, and brokering real estate.

During the same year, ITL Group also started offering assisting activities for the management of practices at the INPS for Italian and Hungarian residents to fill a gap and support the multiple needs of people who have reached the third age.

The ITL Group publishes “Hungary 2014: a Guide to Investment”, which offers an overview on the Hungarian economy, politics, and taxation system. The book was so successful that its rights were acquired by the HIPA (Hungarian Investment Promotion Agency) to promote the country.

See the publication

ITL Group receives the prestigious “Il Ponte” award by the Italian Chamber of Commerce in Hungary.

ITL Group completely refurbishes its offices to make space for even more staff. The company at the time counted a staff of 30 professionals.

ITL Group celebrates its 20th anniversary and plans the new Economia.hu portal.

Explore Economia.hu

We designed our new brochure with an artistic touch. As an element of this, we asked Andrea Piacquadio, one of the top 3 worldwide stock photography best sellers, to shoot creative photos of our team leaders to “shock” the consulting market. We definitely achieved that! Thank you, Andrea, for the amazing job  – and thanks to Mira for the fantastic graphic design. 

We are proud to be the Hungarian representative for “TRA”, the Tax Representative Alliance, an association of independent VAT specialists from several European countries.

Our collaboration with the award-winning global payroll network ActivPayroll began in this year.

When we first established our partnership, we realized immediately that we shared the same passion, to help global businesses flourish, which they say “is part of our DNA”.

Together we provide services tailored to the unique needs of a wide variety of businesses, starting with one of the biggest international companies we work for here in Hungary.

We became the official Growth Center for Accelium in Hungary. Accelium, a multinational Israeli-based AI software, develops higher-order cognitive, social and emotional skills using strategy games.

The Atlas Award is intended to publicly recognize Hungary-based entrepreneurs who exhibit outstanding moral values.

We believe that leaders with an E.S.C. approach, driven by ethical, sustainable and creative behaviours, will shape a better world!

Our experience has shown how difficult it is to identify a reliable consultant in a foreign country, where you don’t have established contacts. In the spirit of helping out, we have created the Tax and Legal Explorer, one of the largest databases of qualified tax and legal experts, members of the TOP 50 global networks. We call this “The Golden Selection”!

We have come to understand that, in order to provide better service to our Clients, we also need to address the know-how of their employees and managers. We therefore decided to create an academy to help enhance their personal skills and professional knowledge development, the ​oxygen and life of your organization.

Since we are firm believers in sharing knowledge, ​we created the ITL Study Center to provide micro- and macro-economic data on Hungary and its foreign investment activities. ITL STUDY CENTER includes a one-of-a-kind investment guide and the Database of Italian Companies in Hungary, which is easily accessible online.

As the number of payroll Clients has grown significantly, we decided to create a separate division dedicated entirely to this service to better meet our Clients’ needs

Today more than ever, our worst enemy is fear. A fear generated by the unknown. Fear kills the mind and freezes our actions. Our task, we feel, is to influence people to reposition their focus away from fear and train it upon a more positive emotion. In that spirit, this website is an invitation to entrepreneurs and managers who have been facing the current economic crisis caused by Covid-19 to share their uplifting experiences. Because we believe stories are powerful! 

We believe that change happens, especially when we are able to share ideas and we create the capacity for it. In order to do so, we set out to create a community of leaders to develop initiatives that strive for a better society. By joining this community, you can act as a catalyst to ​generate change​ and, as an intermediate step, leave an​ inspirational footprint behind for the world. Join our community now to make a positive impact!​ 

ITL Group has reached a milestone – the first 25 years from its founding. To celebrate this event, in 2020 we decided to plan a refresh of all of our online platforms and webpages. 

In 2021 Duna Expert, the leading accounting firm specialized in French-speaking investors operating in Hungary, joined ITL Group.

 The strength of Duna Expert is a dynamic and dedicated team of professionals, lead by Xavier Defaÿsse, a French citizen in Hungary since 1993 with more than 35 years of experience in the audit and accounting profession.

In 2021, we launched our new communications channels.

From 2021 ITL Group is part of the foundation of Unindustria Hungary: an interactive consortium of companies, to create an Italian System using Confindustria Italia as a COMPASS. The Unindustria Association wants to act as a reference point in Hungary for companies already present and future ones, with availability to provide information and services that respond to needs of the same associates.