being card processor, First Data. First Data supports around 70 banks on the system. The solution is firmly for the back office but surrounded by services, including consultancy, training, application outsourcing and systems integration (often to front-end systems). Sopra claims to be able to offer a full back office solution or modules, with the latter becoming ever more prevalent as the card value-chain becomes more fragmented, through the regulatory-driven opening up of the sector. It is feasible, for instance, to take solely the dispute management component. There is also fraud management and behaviour analysis (which can enhance areas such as fraud management and issuing). A key claim is scalability. Benchmarks carried out for First Data came in at 40 million transactions processed in three hours. Sopra claims considerable parameterisation within the solution but also delivers pre-configured versions for smaller customers. Largely for scalability reasons, it is claimed, the core of the system for high-end users remains in Cobol. The original platform was MVS mainframe with DB2 (French banks have traditionally been mainframe advocates) but there is also now a Unix and Oracle version. By way of comparison, Sopra’s card management suite manager, Jean-Claude Ricomini, said in mid-2011 that the above mentioned benchmarks saw throughput of 25 million transactions in three hours on the Unix and Oracle platform. The front-end is written in Java. Sopra claims there is also


now a full Java option for the transaction processing part, for smaller users. The benchmarks were run in 2008 and Ricomini’s expectation was that the performance gap between Cobol and Java was closing all the time so that within a couple of years it was likely that a front-to-back Java version of the platform would cater to all requirements. As well as the technical changes, Sopra added full PCI DSS security standard compliance, as have all of its competitors. Mobile and other forms of contactless payments were also expected to be a major influence on requirements in the near future. The development team for cards is put at around 150 staff.


Most are in Toulouse, which is where Inforsud’s development centre was located. Sopra has a range of development centres around the country, of which Annency is the main one. In terms of the bigger picture at Sopra, it laid down a ‘Blueprint for Growth’ strategy which was defined and evaluated by Gartner in the second half of 2011. With a retail banking focus, the company set about to cover all areas, by building, buying or partnering. It came to cover a lot of areas at one swoop when, in September 2011, it acquired French core


banking system supplier, Delta Informatique. This fleshed out many areas in Sopra’s offerings, might bring cross-marketing opportunities and also provided a much more international user base than with the company’s other applications, as the majority of Delta-Bank users are in French-speaking Africa. Kristin Waeterloos, the company’s head of marketing at the time (she left to join SAP in mid-2012), said Sopra wanted to go more aggressively with pre-packaged bundles of solutions. Indeed, in early 2012, Sopra bought the UK business of Tieto, which added a mortgage and savings suite, Summit, to its product portfolio. Summit is aimed at building societies in the UK, of which about 30 are customers, although there have been few new wins since 2004. Shortly afterwards, Sopra bought Callataÿ & Wouters (C&W), the Belgium-based supplier of the Thaler retail core banking system. There was limited overlap between the customer bases of C&W and Evolan, even though they were both mainly in Western Europe, suggesting opportunities for cross-selling. For example, while Evolan had quite a few users in Switzerland, C&W had built a strong position in the Netherlands. One example of a joint customer was La Banque Postale in France, which signed for Thaler in 2008 and was also a user of multiple Evolan applications around the core. Jean-Paul Bourbon, head of financial services at Sopra at the time and now senior manager at Sopra Banking Software, anticipated cross-selling opportunities in both directions between the user bases. Also, ‘Evolan can be complementary where Thaler is not as strong, such as in compliance’. According to Bourbon, the technology of the two companies is compatible because they are both SOA-based. ‘The investment needed to have the two companies’ products exchanged natively is modest,’ he added. The strategy clarified with the creation of Sopra Banking Software in late 2012, an autonomous entity within the Sopra Group, with its own board, organisation chart and management, operations and governance model. It houses the Evolan solutions, plus those derived from Delta and C&W, and also subsequently those from Tieto UK. There was a rebrand of the products, under an umbrella tag of Sopra Banking Suite. Sopra Banking Amplitude was a rebranded version of Delta-Bank and is positioned as best suited for banks that want a light, straightforward, integrated system that covers all main front-to-back office operations and offers the convenience of fast time-to-market. The system has a well-established customer base of 140+ institutions, with a particular stronghold in North and West Africa. It also has a spate of users in France and elsewhere in Europe (gained largely via multisite deals with international banking groups, such as Société Générale, Attijariwafa Bank and BMCE Bank). Sopra Banking Platform is a combination of C&W’s Thaler


Payment Systems & Suppliers Report | www.ibsintelligence.com 265


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