Banks, the efficiency makes its way in the market… of gas

Expertise and specialization: these are the needs that the liberalized energy markets are showing, rendering continuous and constant monitoring necessary in order to embrace the opportunities in terms of saving on the supply contracts and determining best practices for the optimized and rational management of the utilities.

The gas market, above all, which through the recent regulatory updates shows important transformations and increasing approximation to the market references of the main European countries, reveals how the tertiary sector can single out the strategies that render their own supply contracts competitive and how they have a positive impact on the energy budget. In this scenario, the issue of management of the utilities, above all in the gas market, plays a crucial role especially for a client of the tertiary sector with numerous locations such as banks. Actually, there are still different obstacles and restrictions that make such management difficult to overcome.

On the assumption described above, in April ABI Energia, Competence Center of ABI Lab for Energy and Environment in the scope of activities of the Observatory on the Electricity and Gas Market launched a Survey “Acquisition, Management of the Contract for Energy Supply and Quality of the Service Offered: the Banks’ Point of View.” On the one hand, it aimed to inquire into the quality of the energy suppliers’ service levels perceived by the banks as their clients. On the other hand, it consisted in analyzing the approach to the acquisition by the banks in terms of management and organization.

In particular, in the first part of the Survey the banks were asked to respond to some questions based on the experience gathered in commercial relations with different suppliers since 2010. The inquiry has indicated how some difficulties that the operators encountered in meeting the banks’ requirements are also partly due to the intrinsic features of the market. They are caused by uncertain measurement data and the type of client, a bank which has a great deal of supply sites. They are not only distributed in the entire country’s territory, but the consumption at single sites is not very significant.

In any case, as for the gas market, the assessment of different KPI, despite analyzing from the insufficiency levels of 2010, show a gradual improvement in the subsequent years. In this respect the suppliers are expected to make further effort in order to fully meet the requirements of the clients with numerous locations.

The second part of the Survey focused on the aspects related to the internal policies of the bank, referring specifically to the organizational and management issues that characterize the decision-making process which results in signing a supply offer. This part revealed how the need to combine the offers with increasingly shorter determined validity period with the decision-making time that the suppliers consider incongruent with the energy markets’ dynamics, in view of the extreme volatility of the electricity and gas markets, constrained the suppliers to opt for reducing the validity time of their offers. Such a phenomenon made a great deal of banks to adopt internal policies able to remarkably shorten time for approval of an offer, reducing it in numerous cases to only one day.

The results presented above only point out to some issues that will be discussed at the event that ABI Lab has scheduled to take place in Milan, at the Congress Center of ABI, at 2 Olona street, on June 10. In particular, the issue of natural gas acquisition and management in terms of energy efficiency will be dealt with in the course of a Workshop through both the exchange of expertise among the main actors of the System, who will present their own point of views on the market, and a detailed presentation of the results of Survey “Acquisition, Management of the Contract for Energy Supply and Quality of the Service Offered: the Banks’ Point of View” which was participated by 18 credit institutions.