Product
The uptake of Sopra’s banking applications has a heavy French slant. Its presence in the lending market is a long one, having kicked off its first project in 1980 at Banque Laydernier, then building bespoke lending solutions before the emergence of a range of applications. Today, the flagship is Evolan Lending, rebranded as Sopra Banking Platform Lending, a high-end, Cobol core, mainframe or Unix-based, with around 150 users and sites in 50 countries, mainly via the international operations of French banks, and ComponentBanker, a lower end, Microsoft-based, twelve users mainly in Benelux. There is also an IBM iSeries-based consumer finance and leasing system, Pack SF, and applications for payments, card management and ERP. The company’s first reporting solution was released in 1992
for French BAFI reporting, supposedly the first such solution to be available on the market. There has been a dedicated team in Sopra for regulatory reporting since 1996. Today, Sopra claims about 700 customers for the reporting solution, with 80 per cent of the French market (440 users). Traditional rivals at home have been Viveo (now owned by Temenos) and one or two others, plus international players, particularly FRS Global (now Wolters Kluwer). Internationally, the latter is cited by Sopra as the most common competitor. Wolters Kluwer has wider international coverage than
Sopra but the French supplier emphasises that it has a single, standard offering to support all countries, thereby fitting well with moves by banks to build consolidated reporting hubs. There was a joint venture for Basel II with Logica, with this company meant to provide the data warehouse and Sopra to
User experiences
SocGen has been the most influential customer from the perspective of taking Sopra’s reporting offering to new countries. It started in Belgium and Luxembourg and has pressed on from here, with the roll-out set to bring support for the UK and Germany for the first time to the Sopra tool in 2011, followed by Italy, India, Singapore and Taiwan in 2012. In the UK, initial support was for Bank of England reporting, with other regulatory reporting to follow; for Germany, the intention was to cover nearly all domestic reporting requirements within the first release, including Basel II and IFRS. SocGen had already been the catalyst for some of the other country additions, including Hong Kong and Japan. The standardisation by the French bank reflected a
current trend, said Sopra’s head of the Compliance business line, Isabelle Zimmermann, to centralise reporting across all
provide the reporting but this came to an abrupt end when Logica acquired another regulatory reporting specialist, CMG. Logica (now CGI) became a competitor, with the CMG- derived rFrame reporting product as well as another offering in Germany, Samba. The international broadening of Sopra’s solution has been
relatively recent, and this is one reason for its fairly low profile in this space. The exception is Switzerland, where it is an established leader, with around 130 banks as users, including a lot of the kantonal and private banks. Morocco, a traditional market for French suppliers, is also a stronghold. The wider internationalisation of its solution started in
2006, with an initial focus on Europe, including Spain and Portugal. Mostly, this has been driven by particular customers, especially Société Générale (see below). By May 2011, Sopra claimed support for reporting in 18 countries. There is support for central bank reporting in most of these, plus IFRS and Basel II reporting, albeit limited to the standard version of the latter, due to the lack of demand for advanced support. There is also support for central credit and tax reporting. For internal reporting, Sopra claims banks can take the underlying tool within its suite to support this. The system can run on a range of platforms and is installed on Unix (AIX, Sun Solaris, HP-UX), Windows, and IBM iSeries plus mainframe with DB2 (there is only one user on the latter). Société Générale uses Unix. An overhaul of the user interface for browser support was carried out in 2012. The two acquired core banking systems are complementary to the reporting suite and there might be the opportunity to cross-sell the latter into the former.
operations. The trend started ahead of the financial crisis, she said, then stopped, but had now started again. The aim is to have consistency and control, as well as removing the typically highly manual process of consolidating information. With one product, banks can be sure that the feeding of reports and the philosophy behind them is the same regardless of country, she felt. At SocGen, a single instance of Sopra’s system resides in Paris but the bank intended to gradually move users to a ‘centre of excellence’ in Romania. The end goal is a single international reporting database (the International Reporting Oriented Acknowledged Database – INROAD), with Sopra handling all Corep and Finrep reporting from one place. This means all regulatory changes need be made only once.
Zimmermann saw interest at this time from other banks in both the UK and Germany, with fairly old products in these markets. ‘It seems banks want to see another product.’
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