We examine the importance of local financial development for firms' growth, focusing on the following key issues: the liberalization of banking sector and the financing of firms' innovations and internationalization process. To this aim we consider the indicator of financial development built by Guiso et al. (2004a) and assess its importance by using a database based on the last four MCC-Capitalia surveys on Italian manufacturing firms, covering the period 1992-2003. On one hand, we find that the impact of local financial development is not significant for firms' innovations and internationalization process, both before and after deregulation. On the other hand, consistently with Guiso et al. (2004a), we find that the indicator of financial development has a significant impact on firms' growth. But the importance of this impact appears reduced after deregulation, implying that liberalization and the subsequent process of concentration in the credit market have diminished the territorial differences in the quality of local financial intermediaries.