Intesa Sanpaolo improves real estate and facilities operations, reduces carbon footprint with Azure

Enterprises around the world are increasingly investing in sustainability and reducing their energy use. Some, like Intesa Sanpaolo, headquartered in Turin, Italy, are poised to make an impact at a massive scale. Italy’s largest banking group serves more than 15 million customers, manages thousands of buildings and, with more than 40 million square feet of assets, is one of the largest real estate owners in the country.

To reduce its energy consumption, improve comfort, and optimize operational efficiency, Intesa Sanpaolo DCIL (the company’s real estate and facility management team) collaborated with Microsoft Consulting and ICONICS to create a solution that provides real-time visibility into HVAC and other systems in its buildings, making it possible to take data-driven actions.

“We wanted to move from a reactive management of building assets to a predictive and proactive approach, where we manage assets based on data collected from various systems,” says Giorgio Colosi, Real Estate and Facility Senior Director at Intesa Sanpaolo.

In addition to implementing IoT and AI solutions, Intesa Sanpaolo DCIL created a new team, Data Control Room Immobiliare (DCRI), to support continuous innovation in building management processes and enhance internal competencies and IoT and AI skills that will help maintain its position as a market leader.

Collaborating with Microsoft and ICONICS

Intesa Sanpaolo chose to work with Microsoft because of its commitment to real estate and smart cities ecosystem development and its reputation in security. “As a bank, we are particularly sensitive to data protection,” says Head of DCRI Gioacchino Stoppa.

Considering the complexity of the bank’s environment, Microsoft introduced ICONICS to Intesa Sanpaolo, but the bank did its own due diligence. “We conducted our own evaluation of suppliers, but we ended up making the same final choice,” says Stoppa.

ICONICS makes it easier for Intesa Sanpaolo to identify and resolve issues related to energy consumption in its buildings. The data visualization solution creates a “digital twin” in which real-time data and monitoring rules are associated with specific building assets. In addition, ICONICS’s fault detection and diagnostics technology makes it possible to customize its library of fault rules for predicting equipment failures and recommending preventive actions. ICONICS accelerates connecting numerous different systems to turn raw data into contextualized information. “We were working with building management systems (BMS) leaders and wanted them to communicate in a unified platform,” says Stoppa.

The ICONICS solution provides a platform for bringing together onsite technology and the Microsoft Azure IoT platform and Azure AI solution. The data platform relies on Azure IoT Hub to manage overall data ingestion and on Azure Data Factory for monitoring and real-time data analysis. In addition, Microsoft Power BI provides an aggregated view of data from all sources at a glance.

“Azure offers a complete set of IoT and AI technologies and functionalities, and can connect with all our various systems and protocols,” says Stoppa.

Improving visibility into energy consumption and faults

The bank first deployed the IoT solution in one of its buildings in October 2020, followed by two more buildings in January 2021. The three buildings cover more than a million square feet and house 600 IoT devices that generate 18,500 data points.

Dashboards provide a high-level view of energy usage (heating and cooling), comfort (temperature), and operational continuity. Those responsible for maintenance receive automatic reports of all faults in their building, while managers get Power BI reports with top-level data.

When a piece of equipment malfunctions, the system triggers an automatic ticket with the location and other information that enables a rapid resolution. Once the problem is resolved, the ticket is automatically closed.

The new data platform provides greater visibility into operational efficiency. For example, a mechanical issue in one of Intesa Sanpaolo’s buildings caused the ventilation system to blow cold air through the building day and night.

“It was difficult in the morning to heat up the building, which was wasting an enormous amount of resources,” explains Francesco Peruzzu, Real Estate and Facility Senior Professional at Intesa Sanpaolo. “But IoT devices were measuring the flow of air and feeding that data to the platform, which then analyzed it and identified anomalies so we could figure out what was happening.”

On the energy dashboard, the team quickly pulled up an analysis of different building components and pinpointed the anomaly. By comparing usage data with historical data in the dashboard, they were able to identify the faulty component.

“In the platform, we get a high-level view, but can also drill down into the telemetry of each device, which helps us figure out what piece of equipment is triggering the anomaly,” says Colosi.

Intesa Sanpaolo uses top-of-the-line building management systems, but those can’t provide enough correlation and time tracking across different systems or variables. “Before, we wouldn’t have had the data to identify the issue and would have struggled to resolve it so fast,” says Stoppa. “Having one source of truth also gives all parties involved in operations and maintenance, including third parties, the information they need to act quickly when problems arise.”

Reducing energy consumption and costs

With increased visibility into anomalies, Intesa Sanpaolo can respond and fix faults faster; without such visibility, faults would take a longer time to fix, resulting in wasted energy and customer dissatisfaction. Overall, the bank has seen impressive results, which outpace expectations.

“In the first three buildings, using Azure IoT, AI capabilities in Azure, and ICONICS, we’ve reduced our annual energy consumption by 15 percent, or 2.5 gigawatt hours (GWh) per year. In 2021, we’ll add three more buildings and we anticipate reducing our energy footprint by a total of 10 GWh,” says Colosi. “To put this in perspective, this is the equivalent of switching off a 40-floor building with 2,000 users.”

Increased energy efficiency is not just good for the planet—it’s also fabulous for the bank’s bottom line.  

“In the first six months, we demonstrated annual savings with the Azure IoT platform and ICONICS would total 500,000 euros. If we see similar savings in other buildings, we can save about two million euros each year, and the project will pay for itself a year in advance,” says Colosi.

In addition, Intesa Sanpaolo owns the data that is collected by the platform. “That data is a very valuable asset to the bank,” says Colosi.

The platform will be a critical tool for Intesa Sanpaolo DCIL to accelerate its journey to becoming a data-driven organization.

Investing in its people

Just as important as the technology are the digital competencies the DCRI team has gained. Intesa Sanpaolo DCIL sees the team as the custodian of a digital feedback loop, where vendors, building managers, analysts, engineers, and top management can access and exchange valuable data and insights to drive continuous improvement in operations.

“This is why the bank created new jobs for people that can drive internal change by digitizing processes and taking data-driven decisions and actions,” says Stoppa. “DCRI leads the development of innovative services that improve maintenance and energy consumption by leveraging AI and predictive building management, which promotes more sustainable and efficient behavior of employees booking workspaces.”

In addition, the DCRI team supports the bank’s “Next Way of Working” initiative, which uses data from building management systems to provide additional services to adapt to how people work and how buildings are managed. “With the platform, we can plan and schedule activities for a more efficient use of our assets and give people the optimal environment for their needs,” Colosi says.

With the technology and a skilled team in place, Intesa Sanpaolo will turn to machine learning in the next phase, using AI capabilities in Azure to predict key variables such as energy consumption in a specific building over time, using external (e.g., weather) and internal (e.g., occupancy) parameters.

“The platform is evolving constantly as we gain experience from new approaches,” says Colosi. “This all supports our goal of becoming more and more sustainable, and helps the bank reach its environmental, social, and governance goals.”

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