FLOOR TO OUR MERCHANTS: SI – SOCIETÀ INTERNAZIONALE SPA

Società Internazionale Graziano Sabatino Financial Controller & Treasury Manager
Graziano Sabatino
Financial Controller & Treasury Manager
Si Società Internazionale
The SI – Società Internazionale SpA company history

SI – Società Internazionale SpA (“SI SPA”) was founded in 2003 with the aim of commercialising fuels in the retail environment of service stations, as well as at wholesalers/retailers and consumers level.

SI SPA carried out its purchase and construction activities of Fuel Points of Sale (“POS”) throughout Italy. It all started with the purchase of 28 Fuel POS in the Piedmont and Lazio regions, and later on the company created 10 more POS in the Puglia and Calabria regions. In 2012, a further expansion took place with the acquisition of another 24 POS.

Today, 90 POS belong to SI SPA service station network.

The year 2015 marks another key moment to truly understand what SI SPA is today; this is when the company makes the decision to turn all of its commission-based agreements with the oil companies supplying its facilities, into fuel trading agreements.

The business challenges

At this point, with SI SPA being a customer of oil companies, the company business activity becomes the purchase of fuels from oil companies and their resale to SI SPA Fuel POS managers.

Cash flow management becomes a significant factor within this strategic choice: to eliminate any credit risk, SI SPA requires POS managers to pay delivery drivers by bank cheques before the fuel is actually unloaded to the underground service station tanks.

Moreover, the change of business activity requires an in-depth review of both analysis and control of data and related supporting tools. Therefore, a significant investment is made to implement a business intelligence system, which is developed by SI SPA in partnership with a leading software house: this allows real-time monitoring of profitability trends and volumes towards budget and history for each single POS. By exploiting both dynamics and flexibility of the demand to maximize EBITDA for every POS, this tool has importantly contributed to the efficiency of profitability margins.

The results obtained with MyBank

 

In 2019, with the same approach aiming at an efficient and effective digitalisation, the company works on the integration of MyBank, whose solution gets fully implemented in December 2020.

It was clear that the payment method used until then, which was anachronistic and “burdensome”, needed to be replaced: we only have to consider how time-consuming a payment by bank cheque is for both the POS manager and the fuel delivery driver, as well as all the risks due to loss or wrong details it may imply. This is why we were in search of a solution that could combine 3 crucial features: 1) certainty of payment, 2) speed and 3) streamlined process for the POS manager (let’s consider the time wasted for going to the bank and get the cheque). We found all these features in MyBank.

It should be noted that it took some time before the actual launch of MyBank at SI SPA end, also because its implementation on the company e-commerce website had been planned at a time where the Covid-19 pandemic was starting to disrupt lives and businesses.

Once the integration step was over, the necessary tests done and the POS managers duly informed about MyBank, payments have worked smoothly. After 3 months from its implementation, we are absolutely happy with the choice we made. No issue whatsoever was encountered in relation to missed payment collections or cancelled transactions.

The only aspect that could be improved, if any, is the missing participation of some banks that are not yet part of MyBank network, this is why we still have a few POS managers using the old payment method. Nevertheless, we are confident that all banks will soon implement and make this solution available, as it is widely appreciated by customers and users.

9 Apr 2021

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