PeerStreet leveled the playing field between Wall Street and Main Street by taking on one of the world’s biggest industries — real estate financing. With $5 billion transacted across 47 states, PeerStreet created the world’s first two-sided marketplace dedicated to investing in real estate debt.
Powered by PeerStreet's digital platform, this marketplace connects real estate investors and entrepreneurs to real estate investment loans from their network of vetted private lenders and brokers.
Since PeerStreet loves saving money as much as they love investing it, they needed to understand their SaaS environment and spending.
The Challenge
Poor Visibility into SaaS Spending, Vendors, and Contracts
After years of fast growth and employees that have come and gone, PeerStreet’s IT and Compliance departments needed financial and vendor visibility into the company’s SaaS landscape. Accounting reports helped to some degree, but they just couldn’t help with some key challenges.
"Historically it’s always been difficult as an IT leader to get a handle on SaaS spend," explained PeerStreet’s Director of IT Operations, Scott Frindel.
After changing their accounting tools in 2020, it became particularly apparent that PeerStreet needed to:
- Know all SaaS applications and accounts
- Understand which apps employees use or don’t use as often as they should
- Manage SaaS vendor compliance according to financial industry requirements
The PeerStreet team searched for a SaaS spend management tool with real-time reporting that offered financial visibility into all SaaS apps and their usage. They also needed robust vendor management tracking, as well as contract tracking.
The Solution
Deploy the SaaS Spend Management Platform, G2 Track
This search led PeerStreet to G2 Track. Within weeks after implementation, PeerStreet finally had complete visibility into their SaaS environment. Thanks to G2 Track’s unparalleled discovery process - powered by the G2.com software product taxonomy - they surfaced 130+ tools within their SaaS environment.
After learning this, the Director of IT, Scott Frindel said, "The ability to see overlapping products was great." Scott Frindel continued, "We had a couple of legacy accounts and applications that were laying around. There was stuff that previous employees had set up on a recurring credit card that we weren’t necessarily aware of."
During implementation, G2 Track Contracts Concierge added hundreds of PeerStreet's SaaS vendor contracts and details into the G2 Track system. In fact, Frindel gushed that, "the Concierge Services for onboarding were awesome."
The G2 Track team set-up 30/60/90-day renewal alerts that helped eliminate inadvertent renewals. To make sure no key renewal or cancellation date slips by unnoticed, the team set up both email and Slackbot alerts to key app stakeholders.
As PeerStreet’s Director of IT Operations noted, "G2 Track has given us a new level of visibility we never had before. It’s great to have a real-time, live system and not a static spreadsheet or reports that are 30/60/90 days old."
The Results
Better Control of Shadow IT, Compliance, and Unnecessary SaaS Spending
For PeerStreet, G2 Track brought both instant benefits, as well as ongoing advantages.
As Director of IT Scott Frindel described, "The thing that surprised me about G2 Track is how transparent and easy to ingest results are."
G2 Track brought immediate savings and return on investment
Right after implementation, PeerStreet was able to identify enough savings to cut SaaS spending by 14%.
Of the nearly $200K of savings, 86% came from unused or underutilized SaaS apps. PeerStreet discovered that about 38% of its Salesforce licenses were idle, as well as 50% of its Zendesk licenses. And a number of their other paid services had not had any login activity at all in the last 12 months.
Best of all, G2 Track surfaced such a meaningful amount of savings that it gave PeerStreet an immediate 227% return on investment (ROI) by eliminating overlapping spend alone.
G2 Track offers continuous benefits
The benefits for PeerStreet continue in a few ways. For PeerStreet, G2 Track has become an integral part of their compliance process, as well as how they manage SaaS spending and utilization.
First, for IT, they’re able to closely manage SaaS usage. "The utilization aspect of G2 Track has probably saved us money as well," Scott Frindel continues, "by being able to go back and see who is not necessarily using a product, we can reallocate licenses instead of continually buying more."
"In addition," Scott adds, "G2 Track has really saved me time. We always know where our contracts are located, we don’t have to keep calendars of app contracts, and it’s a great way to track business owners."
PeerStreet also talked about how fast and easy it is to make decisions based on G2 Track. "Everything is available on the dashboard at-a-glance" and then the Director of IT continues, "It’s presented in a user-friendly way. The aggregation of all the information is really nice."
Lastly, the PeerStreet IT team finds G2 Track valuable for SaaS budgeting. Frindel said, "When it comes time to budgeting, it’s super helpful to create a report and see what last year’s looks like and go through and see what projections will look like next year."
A single source of truth to manage vendors and contracts for compliance
As a finance company, PeerStreet has high industry compliance requirements. This means that each SaaS vendor brought onboard needs to be approved by IT and the legal department. Once approved, other compliance processes need to be followed.
Furthermore, since PeerStreet documents the SaaS vendor onboarding process in their security policy, the company needs to prove that they follow this documented process.
What it comes down to is that PeerStreet must track vendor compliance certifications and privacy policies, as well as update their valid terms and expiration dates.
Thankfully, G2 Track made this easy.
Because G2 Track contains a contracts repository, it has become a key part of PeerStreet’s compliance and risk management process. As each SaaS vendor is added, Vendor Management Manager, Catherine Davis made sure G2 Track stores each vendor’s contract, its certifications, key dates, risk management score, and if necessary, the vendor questionnaire.
All in all, the Vendor Management Manager says, "What I really like is the dashboard. I get to see spend by category, and see where there's high spend, and where it’s low. It’s easy to see what contracts I need."
For both compliance and IT, G2 Track eliminates unpleasant SaaS app surprises
Since no SaaS app can hide from G2 Track, in the rare event an unauthorized SaaS app appears on the PeerStreet domain, both IT and compliance know about it as soon as the purchase is made.
This way, IT keeps the SaaS budget on track, and compliance can stay up to date on vendor and contracts management. All made possible by G2 Track.
