treasury & capital markets overview


IBS Journal Supplement September 2015


‘The biggest banks have an


interesting challenge because they cannot really step down from being a complete trading


counterpart for their customers.’ Christian Kromann, Sungard


There is a fair amount of activity at pres-


ent in developing markets, says Christian Kromann, EVP and chief revenue officer for global trading at Sungard, with traditional retail and corporate lending banks mov- ing into trading, typically driven towards a cross-asset strategy by the needs of their high net-worth customers. This is sometimes generating more or less greenfield business for the suppliers, sometimes the banks are replacing ‘really basic first generation sys- tems’. On the one hand, the banks are not too burdened by regulations; on the other, often advised by people who have a tier one bank background, they are seeking relative- ly sophisticated capabilities. ‘They know that compliance will catch up,’ says Kromann. Sungard is focusing on the Middle East,


South-East Asia and Latin America when it comes to emerging markets, typically lead- ing with Quantum for lower levels of com- plexity and Front Arena for higher levels. The demand can come in country-specific waves. This might be where an exchange opens up to foreign flows, as has hap- pened of late in Saudi Arabia, or where an exchange upgrades its platform to handle derivatives, as has been the case in Turkey. The traditional heavyweight suppli-


ers have been Summit, MX.3 and Calypso (although they’ve tended to scale down into tier three as well as addressing the trading needs of tier one and two), so too Wall Street Systems for tier one and two for relatively


narrow FX and MM. Sungard’s Front Arena also edged up into the higher tiers from time to time. Trema with Trading Assistant, subse- quently branded as the Wallstreet Suite after it was bought by Wall Street Systems, had a good niche in central banks although this is being whittled away, as reflected in Calypso’s standout deal at the start of last year to pro- vide a shared platform for Banco de España and Banque de France. It is also worth pointing out that, while


not particularly high profile, two of the Indian heavyweights have systems that can stand as TCM solutions in their own right. Infosys has Finacle Treasury, with its roots in an acquired system that was developed in the 1990s at Credit Suisse and changed hands several times before being bought by Infosys in 2002. TCS Financial Solutions’ treasury capabilities mainly stem from the Quartz system which was developed in Switzerland in the second half of the 1990s. Infosys sells its treasury capability along- side its broader retail banking-oriented Finacle from time to time and as a stan- dalone offering; TCS does the same, with or without its main Bancs package. The latter again has made a good job of bundling and selling subsets of the Quartz-derived functionality for niche areas. The universal banking system suppli-


ers have treasury modules but these are sel- dom if ever sufficiently strong to be taken as best-of-breed TCM platforms and will han-


dle the basics for small to mid-sized banks until there is deemed a need to take a dedi- cated solution. Oracle FSS has a long-stand- ing relationship with, and part-ownership of, French supplier, Login SA, whereby it sells the latter’s Acumen as a front and middle office treasury solution with its Flexcube universal banking system (see p12). One large supplier that did not have


a full treasury system was FIS so, while it is bound to have many challenges as it seeks to integrate the recently acquired Sungard business, at least there is little or no product overlap here. Nevertheless, there is a poten- tial complication with FIS’s post-trade utility that it launched towards the end of last year with Crédit Agricole Corporate and Invest- ment Bank (Crédit Agricole CIB). The offer- ing is based on a number of different Crédit Agricole platforms, including those of Murex and Calypso. Some of the systems that have tra- ditionally sold in the banking TCM space have also crossed into the high-end cor- porate treasury sector (Calypso had one deal at a multinational giant in 2014, for instance, Murex had wins at a couple of smaller corporates). IT2 TMS and Quantum are systems that moved the other way. However, the corporate treasury sector has largely been served by a different set of suppliers (albeit with considerable con- solidation here too, with Ion Trading again featuring heavily).


© IBS Intelligence 2015


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