Head Office: 121 Avenue de la Faiencerie, L-1511, Luxembourg Tel: +352 (0) 278 537 739 Other Offices: London, Luxembourg (development and training) Website:
www.theb2group.net Email:
info@theb2group.net Founded: 2009 Ownership: Private Number of staff: 60 (including contractors) Number of clients: 16 Partners: ALFI, Atlassian, Conceptware, GMG (US), ITQ (South Africa), Netcore, Oracle, SAP, Steria Mummert, Swift Categories: End-to-end message processing, FX confirmations
Company history, progress and strategy
As mentioned above, the B2 founders have roots in Clearstream and its predecessor Cedel (which merged with Deutsche Börse Clearing in 2000 to form Clearstream). Clearstream’s fund order processing system, Vestima, was the creation of Phil Boland and Mark Binck.
In 2002, the pair founded their own company, dubbed AB
Prodata, specialising in financial messaging and integration software in the payments space. Flagship deployment of the offering, dubbed Babel Integrator, was for payment integration between Bank of America and State Street Bank. Five years later, the company was sold to an Australian
vendor, Bravura Solutions, at which point AB Prodata founders estimated that its software was carrying over half of all European cross-border funds transactions. The money from the sale plus private equity funding paved way for the establishment of B2 Group. B2 offers a range of solutions and services in the fund
transaction and payment space underpinned by its flagship financial messaging platform, Global Transaction Service (GTS). The vendor is now touting the fourth generation GTS, which was released in mid-2013. According to B2, the enhancements result in ‘no less than a 50 per cent reduction in the time it takes to deploy new business functionality’. ‘We are growing like mad, and our aim is to completely dominate this niche and become the provider of choice,’ Boland, CEO of B2, told IBS in late 2013. ‘I see no indication that this is not going to happen.’ The company’s proposition to banks and corporates rests on three aspects: experience, expertise and a ‘world-class technology suite that is quick to deploy and cheap to run’. The company is ‘pragmatic’ in what it offers, he stated. The majority of B2 staff are ‘consultants from banks and
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other tech companies with decades of experience, so we are not a “body shop”,’ he stated. The B2 co-founder and CTO, Binck, is ‘the brain behind the software’. GTS came about as Boland and Binck saw ‘a concrete
business opportunity’ in offering integration software and services in the integration space for fund companies, banks and corporates.
The GTS system was developed from scratch. The first version had a component from Sybase, Financial Fusion. Although it was a good product, it was ‘too theoretical, too blue skies’, noted Boland. So Financial Fusion was taken out and replaced by B2’s own development in the subsequent versions. Boland described the vendor’s current GTS offering as ‘all home-grown and original’. Outside GTS, B2 works with third party components. For example, in the investment funds and foreign exchange space it hosts a transfer agency system, Multifonds Global Investor. GTS is aimed at top tier global banks and large regional banks. ‘Our strategy is to penetrate the majority of tier ones in the targeted regions,’ Boland stated. These are Western Europe, the Middle East and Southern Africa. In Africa, a regional partner, ITQ, plays a role, as B2 has no direct presence on the ground there. The main competition usually comes from a bank’s internal IT department. The vendor also sometimes competes with banking and payments software providers, although they are more likely to be ‘friendly competitors’. Management consultants that work in partnership with software vendors also feature. B2 also has experience of competing with Swift, said Boland. There was one instance of successfully pitching B2’s documentation portal, ChannelDoc Generator, against Swift’s own solution for Swift’s MyStandards. ‘But as a result, we had a close collaboration with the MyStandards team,’ he noted.
Payment Systems & Suppliers Report |
www.ibsintelligence.com
company details
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