vendor spotlight: login


IBS Journal Supplement September 2015


We’ll always have Paris


Paris-based Login SA provides a pre-trade treasury solution that goes hand-in-hand with Oracle FSS’s Flexcube. The relationship is a strength but also a weakness.


One of the longest-standing but lowest profile treasury system suppliers on the market is Paris-based Login SA. The main reason for the low profile is that the company has traditionally clung firmly to the coat-tails of its part-owner, Oracle FSS. All of the sales and marketing activity in the last decade or so has been via this route, which means that the only targets in that time have been users of Oracle FSS’s Flexcube core banking system. Login’s Acumen system covers front and middle office treasury. The initial part- nership was with the original developer of Flexcube, I-flex Solutions, with this signed in 2003, at which point the Indian offshoot of Citibank took a stake in the French sup- plier. Today, Oracle – which duly acquired a majority stake in I-flex – owns 33 per cent of Login SA. While the Acumen system clearly does


not have the sophistication and depth, par- ticularly for risk management, of the heav- yweight treasury systems such as Calypso and Murex, nor does it have the price tag or the likely heavy implementations. The offering is relatively old (mid-1990s) but a thin client version was released in 2011. It is written in C, with some C++, runs on Win- dows and supports Oracle but also, histor- ically, Sybase. It covers purely pre-trade, so there is no accounting/GL, settlement, or messaging. Claimed functionality is for FX, MM, bonds, equities, futures and options, interest rate swaps, credit derivatives, swaptions, FRAs, caps and floors, commodi- ties, collaterals, Islamic treasury, and orders, with the ability to take in deals from exter- nal dealing systems. It uses Numerix for val- uing complex deals and has limit manage- ment, including for portfolios. The Islamic version is used by a 2012 Flexcube recruit, Oman-based Alizz Bank. Around half of the 25-30 Acumen users


have Flexcube. There is two-way, real-time integration. Acumen uses Flexcube static


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data, balances, and definitions for bonds and equities; authorisations can be done from Flexcube and deals can be reversed from Acumen. As such, the system demos well within overall Flexcube sales presenta- tions. There have been interfaces to a num- ber of other systems over the years, includ- ing SAP’s ERP, Misys’ Opics and Openlink’s Findur (the latter at a customer in Finland, with Findur handling the accounting). Login’s original system, M2S, stemmed


from work on a system to support swaps for Paribas Capital Markets in the late 1980s. The bank took a 50 per cent stake in the new company, alongside its five found- ers who had previously worked at a domes- tic service provider. The PC-based system was written in Basic and was adopted by a number of Paribas’ foreign branches and other banks, starting with Finland-based Postipankki. M2S was replaced by Acumen in the mid-1990s, with the new solution bringing relational database support. Login subsequently launched the web-based ver- sion, Acumen.Net, with a Java front-end. After Paribas was acquired by BNP, it


continued to use the Login system for a few more years, until around the time the bank was replaced as a shareholder by I-flex Solutions. The latter’s interest was prompted by one of the Dutch takers of Flexcube, SNS Bank, which was also using Acumen. There have been some rocky times for


the French supplier, with a steep reduction in headcount post-Y2K, but with steady numbers (around 25 staff) and perfor- mance since then. Around one-third of today’s team is centred on development, one-third on support and implementa- tions, and one-third management and administration. One difference between Login and most software houses is its will- ingness to customise its system, using its own tools. All current leads come from Oracle,


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