Ups and downs


This was all good news for the supplier but other issues started to arise at around this time. The return on the investment made by Warburg Pincus was disappointing. A number of the middle managers left. The US operation was a particular drain. System Access continued to pursue deals, of course. There were bids in the second half of 2000 in the West Indies, Panama, and the Dominican Republic, although all were unsuccessful. Hewlett- Packard was proactive with System Access in Latin America, with the relationship expanded in mid-2001 to Europe as well. And the drive continued to add local partners, with Austin Risk recruited in Brazil and Computers & Controls in the Caribbean. However, it still seemed a case of lots of activity but few


tangible results. One major hope was in Russia where System Access was head-to-head with MKI (with Equation) for a major deal at Sberbank. The other option for the bank was to extend the contract for its existing Alltel Systematics system, with the latter seemingly the route taken. A relatively fallow period followed. Around the start of 2001


came a fairly small deal when Arab Banking Corporation (ABC) in Egypt signed for Symbols to support deposit and loans processing, nostro/vostro accounting, funds transfer, CRM and e-banking across both retail and wholesale operations. ABC took Symbols to replace an in-house, ES/9000-based system. Unisys’ Urbis was not considered, despite ABC having signed a worldwide contract for the system in 1997. Dr Farouk Chaudhry, AVP application manager at ABC, explained that the Unisys deal only covered the purely corporate activities of the bank, leaving retail oriented operations such as ABC Egypt exempt.


The bank had originally sought to sign with Phoenix International when the selection process began in early 2000, but the supplier’s financial troubles undermined confidence in the system. In the end, it came down to a contest between I-flex and System Access, with the former being rejected on


the grounds that it was deemed insufficiently adapted to the requirements of Arabic banking. Customisation of Symbols for the Egyptian market began in February and was completed by the end of the year, said Chaudhry. Implementation work, estimated to take 500 man-days in total, continued into 2002. The supplier’s presence within this institution was then notably increased in mid-2004 when ABC decided to standardise on Symbols throughout its retail operations in this region. Cut-over was intended to start with Tunisia in the first quarter of 2005, followed by Jordan late the same year, and then Algeria. Eventually, in the Spring of 2002, the S/390 benchmark tests at Erste Bank came to an end, and the bank announced that it would indeed add its Czech and Slovak operations to the Symbols roll-out. This was a vital win for the supplier as it looked as though it would propel its system into markedly larger environments than in the past. The benchmarks saw the system processing five million customers, 13 million accounts and 13 million transactions per day, of which 5.5 million were via ATMs. The length of time taken for the benchmarks was largely to do with the scope of these. It was more or less a complete simulation of the bank’s environment, said Schuster. The first quarter of 2002 saw the bank planning the migration for the Czech Republic and doing the gap analysis for Slovakia. It was anticipating taking Release 8.0 of Symbols around the end of October once this had been fitted with all of the Czech and Slovak specific changes. The completion of the implementation for both operations was scheduled for the end of 2004. In the meantime, as planned, the bank migrated its much smaller Czech treasury operation to Symbols, switching off IBIS. However, as will be seen, the much larger retail part of the project in the Czech and Slovak operations again hit uncertainties.


A new management team and cut-backs


The supplier looked to have a fair amount going for it. Symbols was developed in the late 1980s but that still made it newer than most. Oracle-based, it had received considerable investment down the years from a focused, one-product company. Moreover, that company had strong backing from Warburg Pincus and, on the back of this, had built up a large infrastructure. However, the system was still failing to live up to its potential. At least some of the past problems might have stemmed from the fact that


470


the supplier was seeking to take what was essentially a treasury back office system and turn it into a retail banking system. It struggled for a long while to achieve this tricky feat, with the market seemingly unconvinced by the messages and results. In November 2001 there came a change at the top. Loh stepped down as CEO and was replaced by Olivier Trancart. He was long-haul Hewlett-Packard, having been there for 17 years, ending up running this company’s financial services business


Universal Banking Systems Market Report | www.ibsintelligence.com


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