Avaloq

Last updated

Avaloq Group AG
Company type Subsidiary
Industry Core banking, financial services
Founded1985
Headquarters,
Switzerland
Area served
Worldwide
Parent NEC Corporation
Website www.avaloq.com

Avaloq is a Swiss company that develops and provides the Avaloq Banking Suite software for core banking. [1]

Contents

Background

Core banking includes information about customers, transactions and account balances. Banks have traditionally bought in software for these purposes rather than developing it internally. More functions had to be added over the years as requirements changed, such as for online banking. The result has been very complex computer programs that can be difficult to manage. Coding changes for compliance to new regulations and for accommodating new products can be problematic. [2]

As a result, banks have tended to buy in modern comprehensive software from large, specialist firms. This may be run by the bank itself or by an agency running the computing service on behalf of the bank. [2] [3]

Company history

Avaloq was founded in Zürich in 1985, under the name "BZ Informatik Aktiengesellschaft", functioning as the information technology subsidiary of BZ Bank. In 1991, 30% of the share capital was taken by the employees as a result of a partial management buyout. At that time, there were five staff members and the cost of the buyout was $200,000. [1]

The first customer was Swiss National Bank, followed by five other commercial banks in Switzerland. The system then spread worldwide although it has had little impact in America. [1] [2] Initially, the firm was called BZ Informatik, and its product “AdvAntAge”.

In 1996, the current name was adopted. [4] In 2001, the company split from BZ Bank, as the employees acquired 100% of the share capital.

Product development of the software takes place in Zürich and Edinburgh, supported by a support center in Manila. New capacity was built primarily at the international sites, most notably in Edinburgh. [5]

In 2013, the group expanded its presence in Germany by entering into a cooperation with quirin Bank, [6] acquiring Höll Computer & Software GmbH and establishing Avaloq Sourcing (Deutschland) AG, based in Berlin. [7]

In 2015, Avaloq went live with its two BPO centers in Germany and Singapore. Avaloq is continuously building new business process outsourcing (BPO) centers. [8]

In November 2019, Reuters reported that Warburg Pincus was working with Goldman Sachs and Barclays on a planned IPO or sale of Avaloq. [9]

In October 2020, Avaloq was acquired by NEC Corporation for $2.2bn. [10]

Current activities

Avaloq Banking Group AG employs 2,500 staff, 500 of which are programmers. It has annual revenues of over $500 million and its software accounts for bank deposits to the sum of $4 trillion. [1] The founder is Francisco Fernandez. [1] [11]

The Avaloq Banking Suite software is used by over 450 customers including HSBC, Barclays, Royal Bank of Scotland, UBS, Deutsche Bank, Nomura and Societe Generale. [1] Some of the customers have performed business process outsourcing to Avaloq itself for the actual running of the core computing service, which uses cloud computing. [1] [12] [13] Apart from a 10% holding by a Swiss bank, Avaloq is owned by its employees, and it has major offices in Zürich, Edinburgh and Manila. [1] [14] In 2016, the firm was rumoured to be seeking investment from private equity investors. [15] [16]

The security of the data stored by the system is of the utmost importance. To proactively guard against cyber attack, Avaloq engages a number of companies based in Israel to attempt to break through the security systems and then help plug the vulnerabilities uncovered. [1]

Related Research Articles

Outsourcing includes both foreign and domestic forms of outside contracting. It is an agreement in which one company hires another company to be responsible for a planned or existing activity which otherwise is or could be carried out internally, i.e. in-house, and sometimes involves transferring employees and assets from one firm to another. The term outsourcing, which came from the phrase outside resourcing, originated no later than 1981 at a time when industrial jobs in the United States were being moved overseas, contributing to the economic and cultural collapse of small, industrial towns.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Tata Consultancy Services</span> Indian multinational technology company

Tata Consultancy Services Limited (TCS) is an Indian multinational information technology (IT) services and consulting company headquartered in Mumbai. It is a part of the Tata Group and operates in 150 locations across 46 countries. In September 2023, it was reported that TCS had over 616,000 employees worldwide. TCS is the second-largest Indian company by market capitalization, the most valuable IT service brands worldwide, and the top Big Tech (India) company. As of June 2023, it was the world's second-largest user of U.S. H-1B visas.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Convergys</span> American call center software company

Convergys Corporation was a corporation based in Cincinnati, Ohio, that sold customer management and information management products, primarily to large corporations. Customer management products included agent assisted, self-service and care software tailored to the communications, financial services, technology, retail, healthcare and government markets. Information management provided convergent billing and business support system (BSS) products and services including revenue management, product and order management, and customer care management to telecom, utilities, and cable/satellite/broadband service providers. They had approximately 130,000 employees across 33 countries.

Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) is a subset of outsourcing that involves the contracting of the operations and responsibilities of a specific business process to a third-party service provider. Originally, this was associated with manufacturing firms, such as Coca-Cola that outsourced large segments of its supply chain.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">HCLTech</span> Indian multinational technology company

HCL Technologies Limited, doing business as HCLTech, is an Indian multinational information technology (IT) consulting company headquartered in Noida. Founded by Shiv Nadar, it was spun out in 1991 when HCL entered into the software services business. The company has offices in 52 countries and over 225,944 employees.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Oracle Financial Services Software</span> Subsidiary of Oracle Corporation

Oracle Financial Services Software Limited (OFSS) is a subsidiary of Oracle Corporation. It is involved in financial and insurance technology.

Knowledge process outsourcing (KPO) describes the outsourcing of core information-related business activities which are competitively important or form an integral part of a company's value chain. KPO requires advanced analytical and technical skills as well as a high degree of specialist expertise.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Business process outsourcing in the Philippines</span> Overview of the process of outsourcing of various business processes

One of the most dynamic and fastest growing sectors in the Philippines is the information technology–business process outsourcing (IT-BPO) industry. The industry is composed of eight sub-sectors, namely, knowledge process outsourcing and back offices, animation, call centers, software development, game development, engineering design, and medical transcription. The IT-BPO industry plays a major role in the country's growth and development.

Business process outsourcing to India refers to the business process outsourcing services in the outsourcing industry in India, catering mainly to Western operations of multinational corporations (MNCs).

On-demand outsourcing is a trend in outsourcing wherein major internal operations processes of a company are being shifted to a provider that is paid for by the number of transactions involved. The business transferring the services pays for the quality, special skills and the competence of the service provider's employees. There has been an expansion of the outsourcing concept to include on-demand outsourcing. This refers to the process undertaken by business managers to adopt an outsourcing policy that ensures that the specific business and supplies including technical manpower are accessed as the need arises. It focuses a business strategy to improve its goods and services and to drive a business towards quality improvement.

Neusoft Corporation is a Chinese multinational provider of software engineering services, Information Technology services, product engineering services, IT education and medical equipment headquartered in Shenyang, China.

Banking, financial services and insurance (BFSI) is the industry's umbrella term for companies that provide a range of such financial products or services. This includes universal banks that provide a range of financial services or companies that operate in one or more of these financial sectors. BFSI comprises commercial banks, insurance companies, non-banking financial companies, cooperatives, pensions funds, mutual funds and other smaller financial entities.

The information technology (I.T.) industry in India comprises information technology services and business process outsourcing. The share of the IT-BPM sector in the GDP of India is 7.4% in FY 2022. The IT and BPM industries' revenue is estimated at US$ 245 billion in FY 2023. The domestic revenue of the IT industry is estimated at $51 billion, and export revenue is estimated at $194 billion in FY 2023. The IT–BPM sector overall employs 5.4 million people as of March 2023. In December 2022, Union Minister of State for Electronics and IT Rajeev Chandrasekhar, in a written reply to a question in Rajya Sabha informed that IT units registered with state-run Software Technology Parks of India (STPI) and Special Economic Zones have exported software worth Rs 11.59 lakh crore in 2021–22.

Temenos AG is a company specialising in enterprise software for banks and financial services, with its headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland. Temenos was initially created in 1993, and has been listed on the Swiss stock exchange since 2001.

Fiducia IT AG was a German IT-service provider based in Karlsruhe. In 2015, it merged with the GAD eG to form Fiducia & GAD IT AG.

Banking business process outsourcing or banking BPO is a highly specialized sourcing strategy employed by banks and lending institutions to facilitate the business acquisition and account servicing activities linked with the customer lending lifecycle. These specific BPO services are usually offered through multi-year service-level agreements for all or portions of the credit card lending, consumer lending, or commercial lending segments of the financial services market. Some larger financial services organizations choose to extend their sourcing strategy to include other outsourced services such as ITO systems and software, human resources outsourcing and benefits services, finance and accounting outsourcing (FAO) services, procurement outsourcing, and training outsourcing.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Wolfgang Messner</span> Professor, consultant and author

Wolfgang Messner is Clinical Professor of International Business at the Darla Moore School of Business. Prior to coming to the University of South Carolina in August 2016, he was Professor of International Management at the MYRA School of Business in Mysore (India), and Director of GloBus Research.

Robotic process automation (RPA) is a form of business process automation that is based on software robots (bots) or artificial intelligence (AI) agents. It is sometimes referred to as software robotics.

Ohpen is a Dutch financial technology company that built the first core-banking platform in the cloud. Ohpen is a platform for mortgage/consumer lending origination and the administration of savings-, investment- and mortgage products. The company provides a cloud-based alternative for financial institutions such as banks, mortgage lenders, building societies and pension funds to legacy systems and processes. More than 300 people work at the company's Amsterdam headquarters and its offices in Antwerp, London, Barcelona, Bratislava and Zilina.

Martin Ebner is a Swiss billionaire businessman and investor from the municipality of Freienbach in the canton of Schwyz. He is the founder of BZ Bank, and the investment firm, BZ Group. Through his investment vehicle Patinex, he owns multimillion-dollar stakes in various companies, and his biggest holdings include healthcare company Vifor Pharma, software firm Temenos, and real estate investor Intershop.

References

  1. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 Smale, Will (6 February 2017). "High security: The man who protects our bank accounts". BBC News. Archived from the original on 7 February 2017. Retrieved 7 February 2017.
  2. 1 2 3 Crosman, Penny (7 October 2013). "Can Big Four Core Banking Vendors' Oligopoly Be Broken?". American Banker. Archived from the original on 8 February 2017.
  3. Eckert, Martin (June 2011). "Swiss Banking Software Goes Worldwide" (PDF). worlditlawyers.com. pp. 20–21. Archived (PDF) from the original on 8 February 2017.
  4. "History – Avaloq". avaloq.co.uk. Avaloq. Archived from the original on 8 February 2017. Retrieved 7 February 2017.
  5. "Outsourcen, offshoren, schönreden". Tages-Anzeiger (in German). Retrieved 22 March 2023.
  6. "Business Process Outsourcing: Avaloq und Quirin Bank rollen BPO-Markt auf". cio.de (in German). Retrieved 22 March 2023.
  7. "Inside-IT: Avaloq kauft deutschen Kernbankensoftware-Anbieter". 9 December 2019. Archived from the original on 9 December 2019. Retrieved 22 March 2023.
  8. "Inside-IT: Avaloq baut weiteres BPO-Zentrum auf". 9 December 2019. Archived from the original on 9 December 2019. Retrieved 22 March 2023.
  9. "Swiss software group Avaloq hires banks for 2020 sale or IPO: sources". Reuters. 21 November 2019. Retrieved 23 April 2020.
  10. "NEC acquires Switzerland's Avaloq for $2.2bn". ft.com. 5 October 2020. Retrieved 5 October 2020.
  11. "Our Management Team – Avaloq". avaloq.co.uk. Avaloq. Archived from the original on 8 February 2017. Retrieved 7 February 2017.
  12. Minetti, Maurizio (23 October 2008). "Bankensoftware: Avaloq greift nach der Krone aloq greift nach der Krone". inside-it.ch (in German). Archived from the original on 8 February 2017.
  13. Pütter, Christiane (14 January 2013). "Business Process Outsourcing Avaloq und Quirin Bank rollen BPO-Markt auf". cio.de (in German). CIO. Archived from the original on 9 March 2016. Retrieved 7 February 2017.
  14. "Swiss firm Avaloq to create 500 jobs in Edinburgh". BBC News. 7 October 2011. Archived from the original on 28 February 2017. Retrieved 7 February 2017.
  15. Andreasyan, Tanya (29 November 2016). "Avaloq in talks with private equity firms?". bankingtech.com. Archived from the original on 8 February 2017.
  16. Hody, Peter (18 November 2016). "Avaloq in Private Equity Hands?". finews.com. Archived from the original on 7 February 2017.