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IBS Journal October 2015
Sopra Steria progresses on product and sales fronts for core banking
Sopra Steria is moving ahead with its core banking system strategy following an initial focus on the company-level integration of the two French entities. Steria-derived services and its card management system, Stecard, are being combined with Sopra’s banking applications to extend the overall offering of the group. The merged group has 37,000 staff,
2014 revenues of €3.4 billion and spans 20+ countries, although most of its reve- nues are from Western Europe. Its two main core banking offerings are the Callataÿ & Wouters-derived Sopra Banking Platform (Thaler, as was) and Delta Informatique- derived Amplitude (formerly Delta-Bank), while it also has Sopra’s original lend- ing system, now dubbed Evolan, and the newer Microsoft-based Business Architects- derived ComponentBanker. Amplitude is strong in French- speaking
Africa and also has sites in the Middle East, while much of the user base for Sopra Bank- ing Platform is in Benelux. Nevertheless, Amplitude has Western European sites, large- ly through the use of the system for foreign operations by African clients, while Sopra Banking Platform has users in northern Africa. The positioning now is less about geography than bank requirement, Sopra emphasises, with Amplitude positioned as a fully integrat- ed solution, as opposed to the more compo- nent-based Sopra Banking Platform. Steria’s main focus was on infrastruc-
ture management, says head of market- ing and communications, Edouard Beau- vois. This allows the group to now offer a wider range of services including bespoke developments in an area such as internet and mobile banking where Sopra has prod- uct offerings but banks often want custom developments to allow better differentiation. In addition, the Stecard front-end card
management solution has been integrat- ed with Sopra’s CMS back-end (derived from the Evolan business unit), with pro- jects expected next year, says Beauvois. The company is optimistic of gaining sales of this combined card solution alongside the core banking systems to ‘cover the full value chain’. Also now integrated are the
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Kinshasa, DR Congo © MONUSCO/Myriam Asmani, Wikipedia
Amplitude core banking system sales & go-lives
Sopra has had good sales success with Amplitude in the first half of this year (this was cited as one reason for a 7.5 per cent growth in Sopra Banking Software revenue in H1 2015). Among the wins in Q2 2015 were:
• BCAI in the Democratic Republic of Congo;
• a new microfinance organisation, Express Union, in Cameroon;
• NSIA Banque in Ivory Coast (a
Sopra-derived regulatory reporting suite and, from the ComponentBanker unit, an increasingly fleshed out lending front-end. There are still no plans to strip out the
Cobol-based core of the Sopra Banking Platform, with the company emphasis- ing the resilience and scalability that this brings. One plan that has fallen by the way- side is the once strategic notion of replac- ing Thaler components, including the accounting core, with SAP components. Now the message is merely that Sopra Banking Platform can interface to third par- ty components through open APIs and an Enterprise Services Bus (ESB) layer. The scalability of the C&W-derived
platform is reflected in an ongoing project at the French postal bank, La Banque Post- ale. This long-running project (it was signed in 2009) saw a cutover in June for all lend-
© IBS Intelligence 2015
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long-running selection that will see the replacement of Fact’s Ora-Bank);
• Banque Africaine de l’Industrie et du Commerce (BAIC) in Benin.
One notable go-live came on 1st
July at Banque Sino Congolaise pour l’Afrique (BSCA), a start-up subsidiary of Agricultural Bank of China. It was a five-month project which was man- aged from China, with Amplitude running from a Chinese data centre.
ing components, alongside a number of infrastructure pieces. Deposits and savings, payments, cards, billing and product man- agement will follow. The bank has largely in-house developed systems, plus bought- in systems around this, including Evolan. On the Amplitude front, the supplier
has selected a business intelligence tool, QlikView, from a US-based company, Qlik. Sopra is keen to emphasise that it is build- ing Amplitude-specific BI solutions using the tool, with these ultimately intended to span risk, asset liability/treasury, profita- bility and client and sales analysis. Exist- ing client, Banque Commerciale du Congo (BCDC) in the Democratic Republic of Con- go (DRC), is the first to go live with the first of these, for profitability, and several other projects for this are underway. Martin Whybrow
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