from Accenture; around 2000 Accenture staff were apparently thus employed in the first quarter of 2002. This one-for-all spirit was effective, he said, because each company was able to draw on its own field of expertise: Alnova employees brought an intimate knowledge of the system, while the Accenture consultants supplied local knowledge, often having an existing relationship with the bank in question and experience dealing with the idiosyncrasies of a particular regional market. This was particularly valuable where the Spanish supplier was seeking to move into a new area. Naturally, there were benefits on both sides of the


relationship. UK partner, Simon Williams (one of the aforementioned champions of the system within Accenture), explained that the Spanish subsidiary had become central to the consulting company’s bid to develop ‘longer term relationships’ with its clients. While pure consultancy could be a lucrative business, he said, ‘you have to resell it every year’. In straitened or simply more cautious times, companies may come to feel that IT consultants are a luxury they can ill afford, and in a world of short-term contracts the latter have little to fall back on when the going gets tough. The sale of a retail back office system, by contrast, usually guarantees two or three years of implementation work for the supplier, followed (if all goes well) by many years’ worth of maintenance and development revenue. In the inauspicious economic conditions of 2001 onwards, Accenture saw a significant falling-off in its core business, making Alnova a valuable insurance policy. Gone were the days when the consulting side looked down on software sales as low-value and not worth the effort.


The relationship might also be attractive to potential customers, said Williams. As well as the stability brought by a large parent company, Alnova was able to offer a far simpler contract map than the supplier/customer/integrator/ implementation partner tangle which has given rise to so many corporate headaches. A source at late 2001 signing, Israel Discount Bank (see below), cited Accenture’s ownership of the company as a significant factor in its decision. In terms of the core back office system, the fact that it was based on DB2 put it ahead of some older flat file-based systems in terms of the accessibility of customer information. At the same time, there are considerably newer systems around, and the Cobol core will not appeal to everyone. There is a Java-based multi-channel layer, originally dubbed Altamira onNet. This is intended to support web and wireless banking, plus tellers and call centres. It could be sold with or without Altamira, said product development director, Alvaro Deno. The first bank to go live with the full offering was long-standing Altamira user, Caixa de Catalunya. This cut over in the first quarter of 2001 for internet banking, with support for WAP devices following. According to Deno, a large Italian bank had also apparently taken onNet, to reside with a back office system other than Altamira. By the time onNet was launched, there were already banks using Altamira as the back-end for internet operations. One of these was Uno-e, the first wholly internet-based bank in Spain. The system was gradually heading into larger sites (Hanvit


being one example, so too a fair number of the Latin American clients). One important taker from this perspective looked to be Israel Discount Bank. During the evaluation, a source here said he considered the system to be proven and that the ownership by Accenture was an asset, hopefully ensuring adequate resources even though it had no direct presence in Israel. An inability to find reference sites of a comparable size was cited as a weakness. Nevertheless, the system came out in pole position, ahead of the Bancs system from Financial Network Services (FNS). Contract negotiations commenced in May 2001, and it was confirmed around the end of the year that the bank had indeed signed for the system. A gap analysis phase began around March 2002, with this due for completion at the end of June. As expected, there were major gaps but it was always the bank’s intention to take a ‘buy and build’ approach, said a project manager from the bank. Each module would need to be customised, with a fair amount of development from the bank. He likened the system to a toolkit, rather than a full package. A two year timeframe was anticipated for the project as a whole. By March 2004, a pilot phase had gone live but the project was reportedly over budget and behind schedule. Nevertheless, the source at the bank described himself as satisfied with the performance of Alnova to date.


In April 2004, a local paper YediotAharanot reported that the implementation at Israel Discount Bank was not going to plan. ‘The project will be extended one and a half years over the original schedule and will require an additional $40 million over the original $115 million,’ the paper claimed. A source at the bank told IBS that the Alnova ‘framework’ had gone live but admitted that the project as a whole was running late. Meanwhile, there was growing competition for the Alnova system at home and abroad. A mainframe-based system which was developed at the Spanish rural banks was launched as a commercial offering in 1999, initially as Iris from Integrated Core Technologies (ICT). It now resides with Temenos, as TemenosCorebanking. The rural banks supposedly evaluated Altamira among others before embarking on their own development. Spain and Portugal were among the initial target markets for the system. Temenos sought to propel the system further afield. Given Hanvit’s adoption of Alnova, it was interesting that Temenos’ first success with Corebanking came from Industrial Bank of Korea, with a subsequent successful cutover. A second Corebanking win came in 2003 in Alnova’s traditional Latin American stomping ground, in the form of a large IBM-headed contract at Bansefi in Mexico. In April 2004, Alnova lost a deal at Anglo Irish Bank


to Temenos’ T24 for a project focused on corporate lending. Also in Alnova’s territory (in terms of both size and geography) looked to be the Corebank system, which came out of Denmark and now resides with Fidelity, by way of IBM and Alltel. And SAP arrived on the market although, as will be seen, the relationship between Alnova and SAP meant there wasintended to be cooperation rather than competition between these two suppliers. Other deals in Korea came and went, but with Alnova seemingly not in contention.


Universal Banking Systems Market Report | www.ibsintelligence.com 17


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