AMH under Swift
In July 2010, Sungard sold the rights and team associated with AMH to Swift. Given Swift’s previous strategy of not owning software applications, the move was a surprise. Sungard said it wanted to concentrate on ‘what it does best’ – corporate-to- bank and corporate-to-corporate connectivity. By selling the AMH business to Swift it effectively became Swift’s client, via Echos, the intended single point of connectivity for Sungard’s corporate clients with their bank partners which had about 50 takers at the time of the sale.
All existing and new AMH customers would be serviced by
Swift, confirmed Lázaro Campos, CEO of Swift at the time of the deal. ‘We’ve gone out of our way to ensure that the existing AMH customers are taken care of from the support, quality of service and cost perspectives,’ he claimed. Campos described the acquisition as ‘a win-win situation’. ‘We’ve inherited the entrepreneurship, agility, flexibility and the knowledge of their niche of the market and they get Swift’s support and quality testing as well as the brand recognition of being a Swift company.’ Around 20 people moved from Sungard to Swift as part of the deal. Arkelis was established as a standalone subsidiary, led by Hans Cobben, co-founder of Trax. AMH was rebranded from Ambit Messaging Hub to Advanced Messaging Hub. The Mint-to-AMH upgrade roadmap remained in place. The Mint users were offered migration to a solution from Swift’s existing Alliance range or AMH. ‘We think this is the best way for our customers,’ stated Ken Dummit, president of Sungard’s Avantgard business. He cited the ease of transition, minimal disruption and financial implications as key advantages, plus, ‘who can take care of your messages better than Swift?’. From the Swift perspective, AMH was felt to complement the Alliance range. Whilst Alliance caters for mid- and lower-size institutions, AMH could address the top-tier segment, which, admitted Campos, had not been served well by the company until this acquisition. He believed that a multi-network middleware product, serviced by a separate subsidiary which, on the one hand, had back office support of Swift and access to its services, and on the other hand, had the independence to offer specific rather than generic solutions, catered for the needs of high-end customers. However, in October 2012, Swift announced its decision
to incorporate AMH into its Alliance product portfolio and to disband Arkelis. By that time, Campos was gone and his position was taken by Gottfried Leibbrandt, formerly head of marketing at Swift. A number of departures followed at Arkelis, including that of Cobben. The platform was rebranded as Alliance Messaging Hub. Swift pledged its full commitment to AMH. For a while
it continued to position the platform as a transformation middleware to support messaging regardless of a customer’s network and standards, in line with the Swift 2015 strategy. One of the company’s key objectives was said to be that of provider of interoperability services to the market that was ‘multilingual and does not only speak Swift’ (Campos’ words). Everything then went quiet during a period that, according to Juan Martinez, head of applications, integration and partner marketing at Swift, was used to bring the business fully into the Swift fold. On completion, in January 2014, AMH was relaunched. He emphasised that the AMH team had been retained and that the only departures were in marketing and senior management (Cobben had become CEO at BlueBee Technologies). Perhaps a pointer to one of the problems came from a German bank, believed to be Commerzbank. It took the BOX for Swift solution from Germany-based Intercope in 2013 to replace Mint and AMH. The latter had not met the bank’s expectations for its FIN traffic. That traffic was migrated to the BOX platform over six months, with the solution coming to process 500,000 messages per day. Tellingly, the solution apparently uses less than ten per cent of the hardware resource consumption of AMH. On returning to market, the AMH target market had been modified: it is still aimed at large banks and financial institutions, but no longer limited to Swift’s ‘top 50’. It is positioned as an optimal offering
for complex set-ups,
those that require multiple interfaces and connections, and messaging formats. Martinez believed it fitted well with other products in the Swift messaging stable, which was based on ‘three pillars’. Small entities are offered the cloud-based version of Alliance – Alliance Lite2 – a turnkey, cost-effective solution with integration capabilities. The ‘middle pillar’ is the Alliance Access package. And then there is AMH, which supports ‘complex integration requirements, elaborate database set-up and sophisticated deployment’, he said, ‘something that we couldn’t address before’.
AMH is now only available as an onsite deployment,
a u-turn from the previous strategy to bring to market a complete outsource version of the platform. Martinez said all of the existing customers of AMH (there were about 17 of them) had remained loyal and had been supportive throughout the transition period.
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