IBS Journal April 2015


ent things to different institutions. Fundtech is also seeing demand from


corporates and non-bank financial insti- tutions looking to undertake payment transformations, with an emphasis from corporates on multi-bank support. ‘We know there is a market but we don’t know how big it is at this point,’ said Menachem. Customers cited as examples in this space were American Express, for collections and receivables, and US-based MN Pensions, with a seven-month project for payments. In parallel, Fundtech has been gaining con- siderable business on the back of immedi- ate payments, in countries such as Singa- pore, and looks well placed to do so as oth- er countries move this way. While everything sounds rosy (which,


of course, is the nature of user conferenc- es), Fundtech has had its challenges over the years. The private equity ownership is emphasised as allowing longer term plan- ning and investment than was the case as a listed company. There has been a consid- erable refresh of the senior management, with Ho being the highest profile arriv- al, moving from Misys at the start of 2013. Menachem did refer to ‘some issues with services that needed to be resolved’ and Ho said Fundtech had ‘changed out man- agers who weren’t a fit’. The company has introduced a ‘Customer Watchlist’ which is reviewed every two weeks by Ho and high- lights customers with issues, on a green, amber and red scale. It also, said Ho, had improved its controls and risk management and had centralised key functions (Fund- tech fell foul of the US regulators at the end of 2013).


One of the corporate changes has


been to appoint single account manag- ers for customers with multiple products. There were times, Menachem admitted, when Fundtech sales staff would compete against each other. The overall aim is ‘One Fundtech’ and the structure should support the company’s M&A strategy, he said. The focus for acquisitions would be on small companies with complementary ‘adjunct’ products. ‘One Fundtech’ includes a ‘master prod-


uct’ for each area with, ‘eventually’ the end of support for older products. There will be an attempt to move customers to the next generation products but no one will be forced to do so, said Menachem. There is a twelve to 18 month roadmap for each product and the company claims to invest


‘We know there is a market but we don’t know how big it is at this point.’


Reuven Ben Menachem, Fundtech


around 22 per cent of sales in R&D. Fundtech is establishing a global qual-


ity assurance and testing centre in Pune, India, for all products. This was described by Menachem as ‘a very invasive move but a very important one to take’. There had been a lot of focus on delivery, he added, with the US, Pune and Israel as the main centres, plus an emphasis on partners, par- ticularly for those parts of the world such as the Middle East where Fundtech does not have a direct presence. In February this year it announced a tie-up with Abu Dhabi- based integrator, Gulf Data Internation- al (gDi). For cash management, the way ahead


is Global Cashplus (GCP), with work being done to incorporate functionality into this from the US-centric Cashplus version of the system. A high-profile user of GCP on an international basis is Standard Bank, which signed for the system last year to support liquidity management in South Africa and a possible roll-out to 19 countries. For messaging, in 2013 the company’s


Swiss operation came up with Global Mes- saging Plus (GMP), with an AML filtering system, Global Compliance Plus (which, confusingly, has the same acronym as the cash management system), built on top of this. The users of two old messaging systems, IGT Plus and Turboswift, will be encouraged to move to GMP. For GPP, the strategy was set out by


product management VP, Dagan Osovlan- sky. GPP 3.x has a couple of live users on the Singapore FAST immediate payments system and has seen an upgrade by one user from Payplus RTGS. Also added has been support for payment systems in Chi- na, Fiji and Vietnam, plus ‘six eyes verifica- tion’. Reliance on Oracle’s Tuxedo middle-


© IBS Intelligence 2015


ware has been removed for one customer and this will now be done for the product as a whole.


GPP 4.x has another two banks live


for Singapore FAST and is the focus for the project at Banco do Brasil. Work is under- way to add full US market support, includ- ing Chips certification and Nacha. It also sees the first phase in Fundtech’s move to a layered architecture. ‘This is a very big and important step for us,’ said Osovlansky. The initial focus is on keeping customer-spe- cific customisations outside of the core. There will also be a shift to a more modular architecture so that users can take ‘specific slices’, which should speed up implemen- tations. So, for instance, if a bank takes GPP solely for SEPA, it will have the functionality focused on SEPA, mass payments and com- mon services. In terms of integration, Fundtech was emphasising a Service Oriented Architec- ture (SOA) approach across the suite, to make the applications more open. Unicred- it is combining messaging and payments in the form of GMP and GPP in a project that is intended to replace twelve legacy systems with a single hub. Banco do Brasil, which has a strategy of ‘following Brazilian companies around the world’, is combining cash management and payment capabili- ties, with GCP and GPP. As the competition merges, Fundtech


appears to be prospering, although it too has now become part of the industry con- solidation. There are plenty of regulato- ry waves to ride in the payments space, while a refocus in many banks on all are- as of transaction banking, including cash management, is aiding its sales as well. The company has had its peaks and troughs, at present it is in the ascendancy.


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conference report: fundtech emea


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