g
this period, with turnover growing every year. Profit in 2010 was €4.7 million, up from €2 million the previous year. Nonetheless, there was a fairly sharp downturn in terms of new name signings in 2011 as only two wins were gained. However, the large signing at BNP Paribas towards the end of the year would have gone some way towards lifting spirits. Thaler was selected here for customer account management and position-keeping for its worldwide banking business.
Joining Sopra
After almost three decades of avoiding the upheavals of industry consolidation, it was revealed in February 2012 that France-based Sopra Group was set to acquire C&W for an undisclosed sum. De Groote said the board of directors had been assessing options for the previous year and a half. It was thought that the main challenge for C&W in recent years had been to speed up its rate of growth. It was felt that its size had prevented it from winning tier one deals, with its partnership strategy over the previous few years partly an attempt to resolve this. ‘But if you really want to grow, loose partnerships are not necessarily the way,’ said De Groote. The company had also done its best to grow organically, hiring an extra 200 staff in 2011, but ‘scale is relative’. Another issue with C&W’s size was the shareholder structure, De Groote said. The company’s founders were by this stage around retirement age and still owned more than half the company. The management owned a chunk of the rest and there were no other investors able to inject sizeable capital. ‘This was not robust, and was an issue that needed to be addressed.’ So C&W enlisted JP Morgan to help draw up options. ‘We established
a list internally of companies that we could be of strategic importance to,’ said De Groote. IBM and Sopra were listed; other interested parties were thought to include SAP, Sungard and Amdocs. Attracting private equity backing was also considered, before Sopra was settled on. Conversations between the two lasted around six months, with the C&W acquisition coming just a short while after Sopra also
acquired Tieto UK and just a few months after it had acquired Delta Informatique. Its first incursion into the core banking sector had been its acquisition of Business Architects International, a Belgium-based loan supplier, in 2007. Sopra planned to merge C&W with its Evolan payments business to form a new company. The Evolan suite addresses payments, lending, card management and regulatory reporting. Although both the Evolan and Thaler customer bases were primarily centred on Western Europe, there was still little overlap, so it was believed there would be opportunities for cross-selling. Evolan’s payments customers were mainly in France and it also had quite a few users in Switzerland; one example of a joint customer was La Banque Postale in France. Jean- Paul Bourbon, head of financial services at Sopra, also felt that the technology of the two companies would be compatible as they are both SOA-based, and felt ‘the investment needed to have the two companies’ products exchanged natively is modest’. Bourbon added that the exact details had yet to be worked out, but Sopra would be about an 80 per cent shareholder in the new entity, with Delta to be brought into this grouping as well within a year or two. Delta’s Delta-Bank solution also has its own Islamic banking credentials. The intention was to maintain all the existing products and Bourbon stated that the sales team would remain in place because of this. So while the new company was to be set up with 1500 staff, ‘we will continue to do as we do, and will stay in Brussels’, said De Groote. He also felt that C&W could help Sopra become a more international company, stating ‘we are the spearhead’. By late 2012, C&W had indeed been brought together with Delta Informatique under a new unified branding of Sopra Banking Software. The success or otherwise of the new grouping remained to be seen, although to date C&W seemed to have ably served its customers, reflected in the long relationships and extended use of Thaler at banks such as Banque de la Poste, CBA and Rabobank. Thaler forms the core banking part of Sopra Banking Platform, which also includes a host of specialised products from another Sopra- owned entity, Evolan (payments, cards, lending etc). It is pitched
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