not envisage drastic changes to either C&W or Thaler, but nevertheless the bank had introduced safety measures to the new contracts with C&W/Sopra, such as escrow agreement and exit strategy options. ‘We understand the reasoning behind C&W’s move, the desire to grow and reach the next level,’ he said. ‘We have full confidence in this acquisition, but safeguarding in this situation is common-sense really.’ When Rabobank IDB talked to C&W about the change of ownership, the vendor compared it to the successful acquisition of Mini Cooper by BMW. ‘We said, this is all well and good, but what if it turns out to be a case of General Motors’ acquisition of Saab?’ Sopra followed up its core banking spending spree by making a smaller acquisition in Germany. This showed its ambitions here for Sopra Banking Platform (where the aforementioned Mercedes Benz Bank was a recent live user). The acquisition was of the banking operation of COR&FJA, a German domestic core banking business, for €13 million, in November 2013. The transaction included around 100 staff and a roster of German bank clients including Honda Bank (after this bank failed to implement Temenos T24), Deutsche Hypothekenbank, BMW Bank and Bankhaus Neelmeyer AG. The banks were users of the Corbas core banking solution, which was offered to mortgage takers and private banks. The operation also had solutions for payments, risk management and tax calculation. The suite was offered on a hosted basis or as an onsite deployment. COR&FJA had not been profitable (for the first half of 2013 it made an EBITDA loss of €5.1 million) and was seeking a buyer for the business (there was a bidding process). The expectation was that Sopra would seek to move the users to Thaler.


Thaler forms the core banking part of Sopra Banking Platform, which also includes a host of specialised products from the Evolan business (payments, cards, lending etc). It is pitched at banks that plan a gradual IT transformation or want to revamp a specific business line. It was also suitable as ‘a value proposition’ for direct banking entities (such as Evi), according to De Groote. Product-wise, Sopra’s promise of common components saw the first of these launched in late 2013, for loan origination. Each existing system had its own roadmap and target markets but all were weak in the area of loan origination and distribution, said product director, Michiel Waardenburg, so this was a clear area to address. A development had been underway, from the ex-Business Architects and Evolan teams, and this had been turned into a generic offering, Sopra Banking Lending, which can be offered on a standalone basis or with the Sopra back-ends. It is intended to constitute a device- and database-independent portal and can be delivered in .Net or Java. The offering was apparently already implemented in Benelux (at Evolan Lending or ComponentBanker users), with projects underway in the UK (a couple of the MSS users) and Morocco, at Crédit Immobilier et Hôtelier (CIH), alongside Evolan Lending. Sopra was looking further at whether it could take some of its systems beyond their traditional geographical niches. A


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UK-derived asset finance solution, the Instalment Credit Suite (ICS), which has BMW and Toyota among its takers, was being studied to see if it could be applicable for non-UK markets. The Evolan Lending system was still felt to be complementary to Sopra Banking Platform/Thaler (it helped that the two offerings can run on the same technology stack, unlike ComponentBanker) and a Sopra-derived trade finance system might also be sold with Thaler, said Waardenburg. In terms of other areas of product focus, aside from loan origination, Sopra Banking was working on adding pre-sales and credit rating functions for commercial and SME lending at the time of the loan origination product launch, with completion planned for the next 18 months. The aforementioned deals for Sopra Banking Platform at China Bank and Evi did not constitute a great haul for 2013. Delta-Bank/Sopra Amplitude was acquired by a retail bank in Chad, a microfinance entity in Cameroon and an Islamic bank in Mauritania, which rather suggested that this business was back focused on its traditional geography. The two systems had recorded five and three wins, respectively, in 2012. An obvious comparison was with French supplier, SAB, which seemed to be doing well, with eight new-name deals in 2013 (six in France, one in Algeria – Banque de Developpment Local – and a notable win in Turkey, Turkish Trade Bank). The big corporate change since then has been the coming together of Sopra and Steria. Announced in April 2014, it was finalised later in the year. The route was a ‘friendly, voluntary public exchange offer’ by Sopra for all of Steria’s shares, on the basis of one Sopra share for four Steria shares. The complementary nature of the business activities and geographies were highlighted and the merger was described as a ‘tie-up between equals’. Starting from 2017, the two parties predicted it would generate annual operational cost synergies of €62 million. The combined entity had €3.1 billion in revenues, 35,000+ employees and presence in 24 countries. One implication for the banking business looked as though it could stem from the hosting capabilities of Steria. Sopra Banking Software was believed to be in pole position in early 2015 at F van Lanschot in Belgium, to replace an old system called IBBA, which now resides with IBM. It is thought that the bank was keen on a hosted solution and that Sopra was proposing to use a French Steria-derived data centre. This raised questions about the relationship with Schuberg Philis. In 2016 Service Family challenger bank in the UK chose


Sopra Banking Platform to build its fully digital bank. The year also saw Sopra gain a first client in Vietnam in the form of Vietnamese subsidiary for French financial group BPCE. The project was expected to be complete in ten months. In February 2017, Sopra Steria joined the Google Cloud


Partner program which will see it launch components of the Google Cloud Platform (GLP). Sopra Steria will train and certify its experts with the GCP certification program to aid its clients in digital transformation. Sopra Steria has also mad significant investments in payments area with the acquisition of Cassiopae.


Universal Banking Systems Market Report | www.ibsintelligence.com


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