Saba: a centralized database for guarantee management

About 370 car parks to manage and over 500 guarantees to handle. The aim to streamline and centralize guarantee management. Here’s the story of Saba’s ambitious project.

Switching among the Excel spreadsheets of about 15 subsidiaries of the Group: that was the treasurers’ task to handle the guarantees of the car park operator. “Every day, Saba monitors and manages more than 195,000 parking spaces in five countries. The business is based on public concessions, which require long-lasting guarantees from the parent company. Some concessions have been in effect for more than 50 years!” explains Jordi Llauradó, treasury and financing manager at Saba. In spite of such long terms, Saba is obliged to keep a copy of all the documents relating to guarantees: a real challenge for the teams led by Jordi Llauradó, who therefore decided to opt for a guarantee management solution. With very specific needs.

Streamlining debt and guarantee management

In addition to centralizing guarantee management, Saba wanted to simplify debt management. The Spanish group thus decided to look for a single partner to satisfy both needs. “We wanted a single software publisher for both the debt and guarantee management tools. A good way to speed up deployment and to simplify data transfer” explains the treasurer of Saba.

It was the treasurer himself who analyzed the offers on the market and it did not take too long for him to make a choice: “Finance Active’s solutions proved to be very flexible, both in terms of specific user settings and the tool as a whole, which can easily adapt to our business. In fact, from the beginning Finance Active’s experts have been very keen to introduce software developments in order to meet our needs” tells Jordi Llauradó with satisfaction.

Another aspect set Finance Active apart: “We wanted to deploy a SaaS solution in order to make information available to everyone, in every moment” clarifies the treasurer. Saba therefore opted for a combination of Fairways Debt and Fairways Guarantees.

Shared information for transparent guarantee management

After the IT integration phase, the first six users got trained and observed immediate benefits: “Regardless of the country, the currency or the entity, all the information is available to everyone. Each user gets reliable and comprehensive data since we can add plenty of documents to each guarantee. Fairways Guarantees has therefore become our centralized, shared database, which allows us to streamline guarantee management” tells Jordi Llauradó.

Moreover, the treasury teams can benefit from custom notifications to plan the actions to carry out on expiring guarantees, just to give an example. “This feature allows us to save important sums of money, since we can plan what to do and who has to do it in order to release guarantees as soon as possible” keeps explaining the treasurer of Saba.

Given their satisfaction, Saba’s teams are already planning to decentralize guarantee management and to provide access to Fairways Guarantees to various local users: “The aim is to let our local collaborators update their own data. In this way, we will be able to better manage the global portfolio of guarantees on our side” foresees Jordi Llauradó.

Business sector(s)
  • Transport
Need(s)
  • Guarantee management
  • Debt management
Solution(s)
  • Fairways Guarantees
  • Fairways Debt
Advantage(s)
  • Centralized, shared database
  • Ergonomic interface
  • SaaS solution