The company
Founded in 1881, Banco Sabadell is today one of the leading banking groups in the Spanish financial system. Operating in 15 countries, it has commercial banks located in Spain, the UK and Mexico, and serves 11.5 million customers. Banco Sabadell is the fourth-largest private bank in Spain, with significant market penetration among both companies and individuals.
Alberto Prades is Chief Procurement and Supplier Relationship Manager at Banco Sabadell.
The challenge
“The greatest challenge facing any financial institution nowadays is to ensure business continuity,” Alberto Prades says. “Suppliers play a central role in this regard. Banks are mainly based on technology so most of our IT suppliers are strategic suppliers, critical to success, because the systems must run 24/7. We must manage financial and operational risk so our suppliers must be ready and able to respond to any crisis.” Prades has an interesting view on how procurement fits into this: “The most important thing for a procurement officer is to understand what the business is about. If you do not understand your core business, you cannot help it. And suppliers are part of any bank’s core business.”
However, not all suppliers are of equal importance to the business. “You must understand the categories of suppliers. They all need to be measured but they don’t all need the same level of attention, and you need to know the appropriate way to behave with each of them,” Prades advises.
He underlines the importance of business continuity with reference to the COVID-19 pandemic. “Other businesses closed up, sometimes for months, but we could not close for a single minute. This was a great challenge for us, and it was a major concern that the suppliers should carry on with their activity. The banking regulators require us to be in a position to respond to crises of this kind. To be able to do this, we must improve our resilience year after year.”
The solution
Banco Sabadell started its JAGGAER implementation in 2017 and has since then been adding functionality year after year. “JAGGAER is our enabler in improving things around suppliers for the long term,” Prades says. “Not just cost, but all aspects of the management of our suppliers.” To increase its resilience to shocks and crises, Banco Sabadell is now analyzing the supply chain as far as fourth and fifth tier suppliers. “You can only monitor risk and performance at that level if you have a very powerful solution with all the information in one place,” Prades says. “And that solution is JAGGAER.”
The Future
Banks are currently enjoying a profitable period thanks to favorable market conditions and high interest rates. “But we know that this will change. Interest rates will return to normal levels so we must keep a tight grip on costs. However, that’s not our real focus, which is to co-create new value with suppliers, innovating and transforming the business so that we can serve customers with the new generation of banking,” Prades concludes.
