CCK Financial Solutions Guava Suite


CCK has been a long-standing regional supplier in the treasury systems space. Australia-based, it has had a few iterations of its system, the most recent being the Guava Suite. Progress has been a struggle at times, in part due to its size, but it has built strongholds in Malaysia, the Philippines and Indonesia. Guava, although launched in 1999, is newer than most of its competitors and has an object- oriented design. Its breadth and depth is reflected in the fact that by the end of 2017, it had replaced Misys’ (now Finastra) Opics on five occasions and it appears to hold its own against the likes of Quantum from Sungard (now part of FIS) and Kondor+ (now also owned by Misys). It also gained a breakthrough in Sri Lanka in late 2012, with a deal at the central bank, Since then CCK has been prominent in the Philippine Market gaining Sterling Bank, Bank of the Philippine Islands and Development Bank of the Philippines (with Guava now used by 5 of the 10 banks in the Philippines)


System development


The first system was developed from 1978 within the Perth- based treasury systems consulting business of a firm of consulting actuaries, Campbell, Cook and King. CCK Treasury Systems was formed out of this in 1981 by one of the principals, Joe Wong. A rewrite of the system occurred in 1984 with the original test partner, Philadelphia National Bank (PNB) in Australia, which continued using it, although under a different guise. The system was called Infinity and was intended to span treasury front and back office. Over the years, the supplier gradually moved successfully into Asia Pacific, albeit with a setback during the Asian financial crisis when CCK was forced to close its Indonesian office. The core of Infinity ran on a proprietary Hewlett-Packard platform. The result of a long running open systems rewrite was demonstrated for the first time in late 1998 and released commercially in 1999 as Infinity II. In December 1999, the company announced a first signing, BankWest, which had been a long term user of the original Infinity system. The project included an NT-based front office system called Epsilon, which had been launched by CCK in the mid-1990s. After flotation on the Australian Stock Exchange in November 1999, CCK looked to become a global player. The company realised it was not possible to achieve this in the short term with its own limited resources. To this end, in May 2000, it signed a Business Partnership Agreement whereby IBM would market, distribute, implement and support CCK’s products in Asia Pacific. There was also a somewhat optimistic tie-up with Germany-based Projekt Consult I+B for the sale and distribution of CCK products in Germany and other European countries, but this came to nothing. Infrasoft in India was also a partner for a while.


A notable step forward was the sale of both Epsilon and Infinity II to ING Bank to support the treasury requirements of its Direct banking strategy. This was the supplier’s first multi-site win, with the system set to be rolled out across several sites around the world after the successful completion of a pilot in Madrid. However, by early 2001 things were not going as planned: the pilot site implementation had not been completed, and ING took the decision to place the whole project on hold. The BankWest project kicked off in February 2000.


However, it over-ran and in mid-2001 was cancelled, with the bank seeking a replacement and ultimately settling on Sungard’s Quantum. Coming on the heels of the ING decision, the BankWest loss hit the supplier’s share price. Better news came at Alinta Gas and PNG Bank. The former took the system for its small corporate treasury business and duly went live. The latter did the same. PNG Bank was based in Papua New Guinea and could not be construed as anything other than a small taker but, nevertheless, it was a step in the right direction.


The supplier admitted that the development of the system had taken longer than planned with a design that was relatively complex and with a lot of emphasis on workflow. The system was written in Smalltalk with the Gemstone database, with the two elements derived from technical decisions made when the system was initially envisaged in the mid-1990s. In early 2001, the company held a series of roadshows


around Asia Pacific with IBM. It then decided to rename its system, with Infinity II being replaced with Guava Ops. The official reason cited was continued confusion between this system and Sungard’s derivatives system of the same name. Nevertheless, it might be that the problems up to this time had an influence as well. Either way, Epsilon was renamed


Back Office Systems & Suppliers (BOSS) | www.ibsintelligence.com 119


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