g
Head office: ITS Tower, Mubarak Al Kabeer Street, Kuwait City, Kuwait, PO Box: 26729, Safat 13128, Kuwait Contact: Ismail Ali Ahmed, director - marketing, banking and global operations Tel: +965 180 3300 and +965 224 09100 Email:
ismail.ali@
its.ws Other offices: Bahrain, Egypt (4), Jordan, Lebanon, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia (3), Syria, UAE (3) Website:
www.its.ws Founded: 1981 Ownership: Majority owned by Kuwait Finance House Number of staff: 3000+
Phoenix
The Phoenix Banking System was launched in late 1993 by Phoenix International, a company set up specifically for the purpose by Bahram Yusefzadeh, formerly of Nu-Comp and Kirchman. It kicked off with a consortium of 22 American banks taking a 40 per cent stake and $1 million of capital. Additional development funding, including technical help and free computers, was provided by Hewlett-Packard. The offering started as a pure retail banking system written in C++ and Centura Team Developer. It has an object-oriented design, runs on Unix and Windows, and supports a range of relational databases. Even though it has a reasonably impressive list of clients, none can be termed high volume. By the end of 1998, Phoenix had acquired the Tradewind
trade finance system from New Zealand-based Priority Solutions and was, on paper at least, in a healthy position, with the system installed in 130 conventional sites, with 27 new licences sold in the second quarter of 1997 alone, a 1997 net profit of $3 million and contracted revenues of $21.2 million. Then, it all went sour. Early 1999 saw a profits warning and Phoenix shares went into free-fall on Nasdaq. It is difficult to establish what went wrong, but it would seem that an overly ‘flexible’ pricing policy combined with the geographical expansion certainly had something to do with it. In addition, a Unisys relationship had not lived up to expectations, and sales in the US had not reached the expected target, partly due to deferred decisions because of Y2K. There were also three problem projects in Turkey. By late 1999, the company was in a
parlous state with net losses for 1999 at $6.5 million and sales all but dried up. In early 2000, after a joint bid, London Bridge Software Holdings took a 9.7 per cent stake in the company. Phoenix then had to announce that its year-end audited figures for 1999 needed to be revised and the losses were even greater. It went on to announce a further review of the 1997 and 1998 figures. All this resulted in a number of class actions brought against the company by disgruntled shareholders. In early 2001, London Bridge acquired the company outright. It undertook to withdraw from markets which had proved unprofitable. In Africa, the source code was licensed to Nigeria-based Computer Systems Associates (CSA), which took over the marketing and development rights on that continent. A heavily tailored version of the system, called Equinox, was launched by a specially-formed CSA offshoot called Neptune Software. The Phoenix product name was retained and still benefited
from being somewhat more modern than some competitors’ products, with a customer-centric design. Early in 2001, a number of deals were finalised. Two were in the Middle East via ITS. These followed on from two deals in the Caribbean, one in South Africa, one in the US and one in the UK. The next twist saw Fair Isaac Corporation make a £166.2 million bid to take over London Bridge. Apart from the Phoenix system, London Bridge could also boast a fair trunk-full of business and e-commerce solutions, including customer and enterprise management software, credit management software, collections and recovery software, and enterprise- wide mortgage lending software. The acquisition appeared
Islamic Report
www.ibsintelligence.com 139
company details
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