A broader user base
Over the years, Rabobank has been an important user. The relationship started with its subsidiary, Robeco. Robeco used ERI Bancaire’s Olympic in around six sites and initially looked at taking this for its push into Belgium but was supposedly deterred by the cost of making the country-specific changes. Robeco went live with Thaler linked to Siebel via Tuxedo in
2002. There looked as though there might be a complication as Rabobank’s international private banking operations were acquired by Bank Sarasin, to create Bank Sarasin-Rabo, with the Dutch bank taking a stake in the parent. Bank Sarasin had just signed to take the Avaloq system from the Swiss supplier of the same name, with the contract extended to include the expanded international operations.
The flexibility of Thaler was shown at its first UK site, which still uses the system today, in the guise of government-owned National Savings & Investments (NS&I). The initial deal came in early 1999 at what was then the National Savings Agency (NSA). At the end of 1998, the government announced the largest outsourcing deal in Europe at this time within the financial services sector. This was with Siemens, and saw 4000 staff move across to the supplier. Part of the deal was an overhaul of the Agency’s systems. In the first quarter of 1999, Thaler was chosen by Siemens to handle a single initial area of the business, the processing of Individual Savings Accounts (ISAs). The system went live, with limited changes, in April. The project took ten weeks and saw C&W contribute a six person on-site team. The requirements of National Savings were not dissimilar to those of Banque de la Poste in Belgium. The foothold gained by Thaler within NSA has been built on. In late 1999, work commenced to bring other products off of NSA’s old in-house systems and onto Thaler. The next product was FISB, a form of bond. Savings accounts and bonds were NSA’s main product types so the hope was that once FISBs had been defined, adding support for other savings and bond products would be eased. This hope was realised, with work for premium bonds and savings certificates kicking off in 2000 and into 2001. By early 2000, there were 16 full- time C&W staff working on the project, and the supplier had created a separate legal entity in the UK. By the end of the year, the number of C&W staff on site had grown once more, this time to 30. Separately, Siemens was implementing an Oracle- based CRM solution. By mid-2002 it had been decided to streamline NSA’s systems, with Thaler becoming the main focus. This was not a bad result for a system initially taken as a stop-gap for ISAs. NS&I now uses Thaler for fixed rate savings bonds, savings certificates (this was the first really large product moved to the system), income bonds, pension-guaranteed home bonds, guaranteed equity bonds, and capital bonds. ING also came to figure quite heavily on the customer list.
As mentioned, Thaler user, De Vaderlandsche Spaarbank, was owned by the Dutch bank. In addition, ING acquired two other Thaler users – Caisse Privée and Banque SEFB – with Banque
Brussels Lambert. After some deliberation, the process commenced to bring ING’s Dutch subsidiaries under a single branding, Record Bank. SEFB, plus another Thaler taker, Dipo Bank, and La Patriotique set about the transition (the former was to switch from the old mainframe version of Thaler). They were initially supported by their existing Thaler systems before being brought onto a single version of this. As a result of the consolidation, having had around 25,000 customers when it embarked with Thaler, Record Bank grew to 1.4 million by mid-2007.
Another deal came from an insurance subsidiary of
Argenta, ARAS. In Belgium, life and non-life insurance had to be kept separate, so there were actually two implementations. ARAS took the toolkit version of the system and installed the accounting core. ARAS and C&W then set about developing a series of insurance modules, starting with medical insurance. The project started in August 2000, the software was delivered the following January, and the medical insurance portion went live in the first half of 2001 to replace a mainframe-based system. The functionality was not rolled into the core of Thaler as it was deemed to be too narrow and specific to this user. There was a spate of notable wins in late 2001 and the first half of 2002. These included a deal from Cortal, part of BNP Paribas, for Belgium. As with Robeco, it was focused on direct banking for retail and medium net-worth individuals. Thaler and the data warehouse duly went live to support Cortal’s on-line share trading service, with direct access to 15+ stock exchanges. Next came Eural, part of the Dexia Group. This was similar to Record Bank in that it operated via independent financial advisers. However, Eural was somewhat broader in terms of products, spanning retail, securities, some money markets and foreign exchange. Rabobank was also an important customer for C&W’s push into Asia Pacific. In mid-2002 the system was taken for Singapore. It beat off competition at the shortlist stage from Temenos’ Globus and I-flex Solutions’ Flexcube (which was used by the bank in a number of locations and was also beaten by C&W at Eural). Rabobank Asia apparently felt that its existing system, ERI’s Olympic, was unable to cope with some of the local requirements, including double accounting, and could not support the rapid construction and launch of products. In ERI’s defence, the bank was using an old release of the system.
By this time, the system had gone live at Rabo-Robeco (as it became), but this was a fund house and was a relatively new entity, so was not a big influence on the decision in Singapore. The lack of a site in the region was ‘a major concern’, said the bank’s assistant VP for IT in Asia, Mok Chung Wing. Rabobank had been the first user in the region for Olympic, so the bank was aware of the potential pain from being a pioneer. There were some gaps in terms of private banking support and Thaler also clearly lacked support for Singaporean requirements, particularly around accounting. ‘So the
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