all message formats (MT and MX) and much higher message volumes. In
Key differences with Lite 2 were that the latter supported addition,
the ease of implementation and
connectivity that was promised by Lite 2 could reduce some of the attraction of using a Swift bureau. ‘If it does only the connection to Swift then I can understand how a bureau would feel challenged by Lite 2,’ said Dirk Vanachter, Swift’s Alliance Lite 2 product manager, shortly after its launch. Sterci was a significant acquisition in August 2013. It was founded in 2003 after a management buyout of the Swiss products division of French supplier, Steria. As part of the deal, Steria was retained as a distributor for the Sterci products. For much of its history, Sterci was privately owned by four managers.
At the time of the takeover, Hughes stated: ‘Financial
messaging is an exciting marketplace with significant growth. It boasts a double-digit growth rate year-on-year, with about 400 organisations – a mixture of banks, financial institutions and corporates – joining Swift every year’. Bottomline now claimed 530 Swift messaging customers across 20 countries, and 200+ Swift experts on its payroll (50 prior to the acquisition). Bottomline was keen to emphasise that there was no product or customer overlap. ‘There are fantastic cross- selling opportunities,’ commented Hughes. The Simplex team in London has been integrated into
Bottomline’s Swift Access Service unit, which stemmed from the acquisition of SMA Financial. It was the successful incorporation of SMA that spurred the further M&A activity of Bottomline, said Hughes. ‘Over the last three years, it has doubled in revenues and brought some great new customers. It made us hungry to do more in that space and widen our footprint.’ Sterci and Simplex expanded Bottomline’s portfolio to
reconciliations, specialised messaging in the fund markets, and a wide range of Swift accreditations. In terms of new locations with ‘Swift expertise on the ground’, the takeover added Geneva, Frankfurt, Paris, New York, Toronto and Singapore.
As well as the GTMatch matching system, GTExchange
messaging system, and Swift bureau, Sterci brought the application integration middleware solution, GTFrame (formerly Steform), and a market data management solution, GTData (Keydata).
In the couple of years prior to its acquisition, the company had been undergoing some expansion, reflected in the opening of the office in Singapore in 2010, in Toronto in early 2011 and in New York in early 2012. By the time of its acquisition, it had around 120 staff. A rebrand of its products at Swift’s Sibos conference in Toronto in October 2011 reflected the revamp. This resulted in the ‘Ste-’ prefix replaced by ‘GT-’ in the product names.
The Simplex piece of the jigsaw had been brought into
Sterci in phases. Simplex had been set up in 1997, largely focused on consultancy. Steria and Simplex teamed up in 2003 to establish a Swift service bureau in the UK based on GTExchange, plus GTFrame and GTMatch. The UK initiative mirrored a similar one in Luxembourg, where Steria had
worked with Cetrel. While the latter did not take off, Sterci opened its own bureau in Switzerland in 2006, so that it could provide a solution that met requirements to retain data and infrastructure within the country. The Swiss service is mainly used by domestic private banks,
although by 2012 it had gained its first domestic German taker in the form of government owned Deutsche Pfandbriefbank AG (PBB) as well as an unnamed first domestic Asian taker. This had all come as part of a dramatic increase in uptake, which had seen Sterci double the number of users of its bureau (to more than 100) in the previous year. It was claimed that part of the surge had come from users of Mint, which was being withdrawn. In fact, PBB had switched from the in-house use of Swift’s Alliance Access interface as it was not keen to carry out an in-house migration to SwiftNet 7.0, said Sterci’s international sales and partnerships director, Etienne Savatier. The Simplex partnership was strengthened in 2009 when
Sterci took a 25 per cent stake in its partner, with this increased to 51 per cent in January 2011.
On the partnership side, GTExchange forms the Swift part of Unisys’ Open Payments Platform (OPP). This is alongside Dovetail’s platform as the payment hub, Oracle for reporting and business intelligence, and Distra for high-volume messaging. Sterci also had partnerships with a number of application providers. Wall Street Systems was added in October 2010, to resell GTFrame alongside its Wallstreet FX Sigma system. Sterci aimed to build up country-specific partners to further its geographical expansion, with Asia Pacific one focus for this. Saudi Arabia is a market of strength, stemming from early support for the country’s local clearing system, Saudi Arabian Riyal Interbank Express (Sarie). Sterci claimed 15 of the 20 banks operating in the country as users of GTExchange. These included several international banks, with Deutsche Bank joining the list in 2010 when it set up in the country. Sterci had worked for over a decade with a local partner, Ejada Systems. This company had around ten staff dedicated to Sterci products. Sterci also had customers in Bahrain and Dubai.
In North America, its main customer has been TD Bank,
which replaced Mint with GTExchange. In Asia Pacific, there are a few customers, mostly made up of the overseas operations of Swiss banks. In total, Sterci claimed more than ten replacements of each of Mint and IBM’s Merva. One of the latter has been in Austria, at a service bureau supporting three domestic banks, Drei Banken EDV. Others have been Banque Privée Edmond de Rothschild and Rothschild Bank in Switzerland. Less than a year after its acquisition of Tel Aviv-based cyber
fraud detection provider Intellinx, Bottomline Technologies integrated the solution into its digital banking platform. Such banking solutions are aimed at helping banks serve business customers, with a particular emphasis on payments and cash management services. Consequently, it has long had anti- fraud technologies targeted toward detecting payments fraud. The Intellinx technology enabled the addition of protections to Bottomline’s digital banking platform.
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