and eight other countries, principally in southern Europe. In France alone this extended to around 3000 branches and 6000 agency outlets by the end of 2005. From this pool, the bank had attracted more than 250,000 customers, with a stated objective of opening at least 70,000 new accounts a year. In 2004, it contributed revenues of €23 million to the Group’s net assets of €4 billion. Groupama managed around €80 billion of assets. Groupama Banque had its genesis in the Group’s existing dedicated banking unit, Banque Finama. This business provided custody services, payment and treasury management, and lending to Groupama’s insurance member entities. Although initial plans for setting up Groupama Banque were laid down in early 2002, the big push did not occur until May 2003, when Finama began to transfer across to Groupama Banque its mass retail lending activity as well as the client bases of its regional entities. Full transfer of the 120,000 retail accounts was planned for mid-2007. In developing its back office banking systems and, given the enormity of the network, a CRM system that could give all sales staff real-time access to information, there was extensive swapping of IT expertise with specialist teams from SocGen.


The main objective in the first few months was to establish a technical platform common to the Groupama Banque and CRM projects. As a green-field technology site, the team sent out an RFP to a number of local suppliers in mid-2002. The bank was only interested in packaged solutions. According to Groupama Banque’s head of IT, Lydie Assouline, SAB was eventually selected because it had a broad base of reference sites in the country and could demonstrate the system’s ability to cope with French regulatory demands. ‘We also needed to have a stable product,’ she said. ‘SAB is a product with experience.’


In November 2002, the pilot regional mutuals (Rhône-


Alpes and Maine) were live and actively marketing Groupama Banque products on a fully operational system. The system was deployed more widely within the Group in 2003. In doing so, Groupama became the first major French insurance company to create a complete multi-line retail bank, and set it up in all commercial outlets of its regional mutual insurance offices. The entire set of SAB back office modules was implemented


from scratch on an AS/400. The system was physically located in the Group’s IT centre at Bourges, in central France. The bulk of the project took one year, including parameterisation.


Although products are changed to meet customer demand (work that is mostly carried out under the maintenance contract), the system is now complete and live in every location. The last piece – credits – went into production towards the end of 2005 The project was carried out jointly by the bank and SAB


personnel. A number of enhancements were required, but mostly these concerned the interface between SAB and the bank’s partners. Of particular importance, as a retail bank, was the link to credit checking bureau, Experian, which enabled staff to quickly process credit applications. At the front-end it uses Siebel’s CRM system, which has been implemented in every branch and agency. All sales are validated in the Siebel system, but accounts are created in the SAB back office. The exchange of customer, contract and product data between Siebel and SAB is fully automated, running through an EAI system from Vitria. This enables a single view of the customer across all locations, and cross- selling opportunities between banking and insurance. Once an account is established, if customers wish to make


a transaction or check a balance, for example, they can either contact the dedicated Groupama Banque call centre, use the website, or use the French Minitel system to carry out the transaction in SAB.


With the system live, Assouline admitted the implementation was not trouble-free, although she added that there is probably no such thing as one that is. ‘We have a hotline with SAB, where we can declare any problems,’ she said. Where particularly problematical areas had arisen, and she declined to elaborate, the vendor had delivered patches at a rate of one per week. Generally, there was a strong relationship between client


and vendor, with a good communication link. But Assouline suggested that as SAB grew and brought in more customers, it might be in danger of spreading itself too thinly. The hotline worked well, she said, but more staff were needed, ‘especially for the projects’. I


In August 2016, SAB AT was selected by Abu Dhabi based - Reem Finance as its new core banking system, after an extensive evaluation process. SAB AT’s ability to support multiple products and services was a key factor in its selection by Reem, which is aiming to grow in its core market in the UAE. This is the first success for SAB in the core banking sector in the UAE.


Universal Banking Systems Market Report | www.ibsintelligence.com 357


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