User experiences
West Immo Bank was an early risk customer for SAP. It was founded in 1995 by three Landesbanks (WestLB, Landesbank Rheinland-Pfalz and what became Landesbank Baden- Württemberg). They wanted to centralise their mortgage activities. West Immo first entered into a relationship with SAP in 1998. It took the Consumer and Mortgage Loans (CML) system and this went live in the second quarter of 1999. West Immo then added a number of modules from SAP’s core banking system, including Bank Customer Accounts (BCA) and Material Management. ‘All of our core processes are managed with SAP,’ said Heinz Mauer, a director at West Immo. Outside of the core, the bank used Reuters’ Kondor+ for trading, IBM’s Merva for internal money transfers, and Logica’s Samba for German regulatory reporting. As SAP modules were installed step by step, elements of the legacy system were discarded until it was finally switched off in August 2002. At this point, attention turned to IAS and Basel II compliance, and, in December 2002, the bank opted to stay with SAP for these as well. ‘From an investment point of view, both Basel II and IAS
are so long-lasting and expensive that banks don’t just go to their current vendor,’ said Jens-Peter Jensen, senior solution architect at SAP, at the time. ‘This is a huge opportunity for us, as we are not as strong as we would like to be in some markets. Banks are considering a wide number of vendors for these projects, including those they have never considered before.’ The SAP compliance offerings were designed to sit alongside other core banking modules on the same financial database layer. The database supported both operational and analytical systems, and the supplier claimed that this meant an end-to-end fit. Jensen said that, while he could not guarantee that the fit would be so perfect with systems from other vendors, SAP’s Basel II and IAS modules could in theory be used by a bank that has no existing SAP products in its software landscape. However, there were no examples of such a set-up at this time. Mauer observed that, ‘at the time of the decision, there
was no real competitor for a database-based Basel II solution that we knew of’. Jensen confirmed this view. ‘SAP entered into development of these solutions at a time when others didn’t think about it,’ he said. ‘We are now at a very advanced stage.’ According to Mauer, the supplier’s German roots were also a factor in the bank’s decision. ‘Foreign vendors have a problem with German regulatory reporting to the Deutsche Bundesbank.’ Following the formal selection, one of the first decisions made by West Immo was to implement the IAS and Basel II solutions in parallel, meaning that the database would only need to be customised once.
According to Mauer, the bank set a budget of €3 million
for implementing the IAS solution, and he claimed that the implementation had kept to timescales and budget. The bank went live in 2004 for IAS, with Basel II having a somewhat longer project and later cut-over. This made sense, since the deadline for IAS compliance was 1st January 2005, a full two years prior to the Basel II cut-off. Mauer claimed that other banks were looking at West
Immo for guidance in their own compliance efforts. ‘We are far ahead of many other banks,’ he said. One of the reasons for this was that West Immo was ‘very lean’. The entire IAS and Basel II project team at West Immo amounted to just 20 people and had deep SAP knowledge. In late 2008, it was announced that Delta Lloyd Bank, the
Belgian retail and private bank, was set to pioneer Thaler on SAP, the joint development of C&W and SAP. As mentioned, the combined offering consists of SAP’s analysis and accounting tools, pre-configured and integrated with C&W’s core system, Thaler (now owned by Sopra, following this French company’s acquisition of C&W in early 2012). Delta Lloyd had been a C&W core banking customer since 2004, when Thaler was implemented for wealth management and retail securities. The bank acquired Bank Analyzer, as well as SAP FI (which would be used as a general accounting tool) and SAP BI (which would be used as a data warehouse and reporting tool). ‘One of the things the bank was looking for was to improve
its data warehouse capabilities and to have a single source of truth, which wasn’t the case at the time,’ said Luc Luyten, regional sales manager at C&W. ‘So, we managed to convince the bank that the SAP component would be an ideal extension to Thaler.’ Thaler on SAP was to be deployed at Delta Lloyd’s head office, while the branches (the bank had a wide network of over 265 offices and agents) would be connected to it via a home-grown front-end. The solution went live in July 2009. Another long-standing Thaler user, Banque de la Poste, became the second taker of Thaler on SAP. A full go-live was scheduled for March 2011, with the new system intended to completely replace the existing version of Thaler which had been running in the bank since the mid-1990s. Another success came in late 2009, at Malaysian lending specialist, Sabah Credit Corporation. The deal included Islamic finance with support from a newly-developed Islamic banking module for Thaler. The software was expected to go live in early 2010 and it was C&W’s first win in the country. Also signing for Thaler on SAP, in late 2008, was Entreprise des Postes et Télécommunications (EPT) in Luxembourg. By 2008, over in Canada, ATB Financial had also signed a deal with SAP which was meant to see a broad roll-out of solutions, including SAP’s core banking system and Bank Analyzer, over the next couple of years. This was a highly notable deal as it represented the first such decision by one of the larger Canadian banks, albeit with other banks
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