SunGard looks to push for Middle East market share

"We have been in the Gulf region since 1980 with our customers, meaning we partner with financial institutions in good times and tricky periods," Khoury told AMEinfo.com in an interview. SunGard serves 25,000 customers in 70 countries, and generated a turnover of $5.51bn in 2009.

SunGard's product range is diverse, ranging from software for front offices to solutions for electronic payments and core banking. However, 55% of SunGard's business is generated with financial IT services, Khoury noted.

In 2008, the company set up a branch in the Dubai International Financial Centre. "In 2011, we will open our next branch in Saudi Arabia," he said. "The exact location as not been decided as yet, it could be Riyadh." The Kingdom is a natural expansion, as Saudi Arabia was impacted less by the financial crisis than the UAE or Bahrain. "This is the right time to expand to KSA," he noted.

Companies found SunGard's highly standardized software particularly useful during the downturn. "When the markets go down, banks, insurers and asset managers need higher efficiency and technological innovation, and SunGard can help them achieve that," he noted.

Rapid GCC expansion

Despite the global crisis being far from over, the company is expanding quickly. "Two of the region's biggest sovereign wealth funds are among our clients. On top of that, we provide Shariah-compliant core banking software to the top Islamic financial institutions in five out of six GCC markets," he said.

Core banking solutions, once implemented, are usually designed for strategic usage, making it difficult for competing firms to win the bank as a client. But SunGard's rivals in this field, such as Temenos from Switzerland, Mumbai-based InfrasoftTech or Microlink from Malaysia also offer such complete solutions for Islamic banks. Temenos won Al Hilal Bank in Abu Dhabi as an IFI client, whereas the conventional bank National Bank of Fujairah opted for Temenos' T24 suite in 2007.

Growth in networks

SunGard is confident that it will grow further with its concept of providing "transparency, efficiency and networks." With SunGard MarketMap, the firm even started to rival Bloomberg and ThomsonReuters, the big two global providers of market data information.

"MarketMap resulted from our acquisition of GL Trade in France," he pointed out, noting that half of SunGard's company growth has been done through acquisitions. He said the company acquires about 10 to 12 companies a year, on average.

The firm is growing steadily in Europe with MarketMap, as it has won banks in Switzerland and the UK as clients. "We are not strangers to such market information solutions. When the time is right we will expand MarketMap into the Middle East," he noted.

Loooking ahead, Khoury says the biggest challenge facing the software industry is competition for talent. "In order to attract the right people, we cooperate with universities in the region. A bit less than 30% of our products serve the educational sector, an area we call SunGard Higher Education," he said.