Sopra Steria Financial Services Analyst Day 2023 - Introduction

Speaker: Pierre Lahbabi - Group Financial Services Lead - Sopra Steria

Good morning. Good afternoon. Hello, everyone. I'm glad to welcome you today for a second and that is day. We are live today in our Paris studio. So, we plan to make this a yearly event to provide you with updates on your business, on your new product release, and about key market trends. We value very much the interactions that we have with you as market analyst and therefore it's a pleasure to be again with you today and to exchange about your views and also have some exchanges on market trends.

I will start to introduce myself so I'm piano ready. I'm group financial services leader and my role is to coordinate all of our activities intended to serve of financials, services, clients across all geographies and business line so that we can deliver more value. And to to our clients, we continue our introduction by presenting an overview of our activities in financial services.

So first, with a so posterior as a group. So posterior is a technology company with three called Businesses Consulting Digital Services and tech services and software. You see on the slide here a few key figures about scale and or European and global footprint at so the idea last year 2022 was a year of major achievement for the company and we had two important milestones that we came over.

The first one is that we are now a company of more than 50,000 employees and we also reach the milestone of €5 billion of revenues. But these are not the figures which are so important. This means that last year we attracted more than 10,000 new talents joining and reaching all competencies in the company. And this means also as regards the turnover revenue that the clients, they continue to trust us and to be in line with us for their strategic transformation projects.

I have also to say that last year was a year where we achieved significant acquisitions. The first one is the one of six, which is becoming a reality this week, a company dedicated to aerospace and two critical mission systems that we cybersecurity capabilities. And we also are starting to walk with our colleagues, new colleagues from two Vienna, a company of digital services in the bay in Belgium, which is very active in financial services.

Finally, just this week, we announced a project to also acquire another important company in the Benelux regions on demand. And all of these capabilities will strengthen and will help us to deliver more value to our banking clients. So now move to support in financial services. What do we do for our banking clients? So, we are active across these three business lines consulting, tax services and software.

Of course, we have a global footprint, thanks mainly to our software business. As you see on the map on the slide, we are also very strong in Europe in your consulting and in your digital services business. So, this means that in Europe we have a complete end to end offering regarding financial services managing. So, three types of activities.

We have extended client relationship across the globe and an exceptional coverage of the largest European bank as well, be it in one of the businesses. These positions have been built off as a year and I'm glad that we also can gather more than 10,000 individuals and professionals addressing or banking clients. If we look at organization, you may have heard and, you know, some of our brands and capabilities for banks and financial services.

Let's have a short overview of what are the different capabilities that we can put together. You have fast banking software that was introduced by Erik, the CEO, and this is one of the leading software, Ed, globally with more than 400 million revenues in software for financial institutions. So, this is more or less 35 or 40% of the revenues that we generate in financial services.

You have surpassed Daniel providing integration services and IT capabilities for all banking clients. So, past your next or consulting brand specialized in management consulting and in digital transformation and consulting will have a number of examples of the type of assignments that they realize. Now coming on the other part of the slide, you have a safety, so financial technology companies that was set up in the context of the project which was found at banks, and which is delivering for German banks full as a service banking platform.

You have developed a specialized company in payments with consulting services and dedicated software for all payments clients. And finally, so Posterior Ventures. And you will see that we are very involved with the fintech ecosystem looking at all your capabilities. We also have some transversal entities across the industries that address and support banking clients. Among them, you have the CTO and his teams, a center of excellence for technologies that gather world class expertize and capabilities around advanced technologies such as blockchain or other technologies.

We have then dedicated teams for cyber security and infrastructure and management will also have examples of our projects. And finally, three delivery centers, global delivery centers, one in Spain, one in Poland and one in India. I would also like to mention X, Y or sister company and preferred partner and this is a company and reaching on offering with middleware, software and API management platforms.

So, all in all, as introduced by Eric, we are putting together a unique set of capabilities and competencies for clients in financial services. We will now take a step back and look at the ecosystem. If we are so strong in financial services, we need also to be very involved and to have an active role in the financial services industry in Europe.

And this is exactly what we are doing, looking at the different ways we are involved. We are involved with third parties, first with fintechs. You see here a number of logos we invest directly in fintechs, as we did recently in Algon credit scoring company based in France, all indirectly through this fund. But the most important part of our relationship with fintechs is not about capital gain and investment.

It's about driving extended value proposition and partnership with them for banking clients. I will give two examples. So, the first one is, we think that allows us to reach more than 3000 financial institutions across Europe through their APIs and another one with Chainalysis. We announced this partnership last year, which enables us to bring state of the art compliance solution about crypto.

We combined expertize in crypto and all knowledge of institutions, financial institutions in Europe. And if we move then to the second type of partners, we are of course having strong relationships with Hyperscalers for the cloud services and we software provider which are very active and involved in financial services. You have the names here and we have professionals which are ex-pats integrating our technologies, supporting our clients in move to cloud approaches with these partners being present in the ecosystems.

This also means being active in leading industry associations. This means also publishing thought leadership documents. We'll come back to that. And this means also being able to share and to gather clients and stakeholders. And this is what we are doing with this super banking summit. And I'm pleased to say that we will have the sound editions this year.

She sees a major event in the industry with more than 5000 participants at the event last year. So, as you see, we are very involved in the ecosystem and clearly I also include you as market analyst as playing a key role in this ecosystem. And I would like to thank you again for the insight. The discussions help us to build our vision, to drive our product roadmaps, and also to help our client to make a good decision about the choices of their supplier.

So, this was for the overview of supply area in financial services. We now come to our ambition and to our priorities. So, for ambition, you see here the text that was validated by the Board of Supply Group, and which reflects high ambition that we have across all businesses for financial services. I'm not going to comment this text, but maybe to pick a few keys wants.

So first one here is a long term. We are a European player with a long-term strategy. We have long term relationship with our clients, and we are here to stay. This is something that is a key characteristic of the company. Second one I would like to think is a digital battle. We know all that banks have a lot of competition from newcomers and that this competition is taking place on digital field.

We want to help banks in this digital battle. We are clearly on their side supporting them to take all the benefits that the digital can bring. Beat for optimization of internal processes. All for developing new solutions and new services. And finally, the last one would be suffering. We are a European company, and it can be very important for banks during these troubled times.

Sovereignty is a major topic as well for banking in Europe. So, as you see, we don't lack ambition in financial services. Let's have a look now at how we deliver this ambition about and what are our priorities to define our priorities. We set up a framework with a three dimension. First one is about transformation going on at banks, which concerns all of their business lines.

So, as you see the first dimension, we want to address topics that really matters for banks. Second dimension is about the business lines that we address for banks. And the third one about core technological capabilities. Looking at a first dimension, you see here a number of topics that Eric already mentioned. They are major challenges for banks and the good news is that for each of them, we have an offering, we have capabilities, and we have references to support them and deliver value.

We help them to become more agile, to be more efficient, to optimize their process, to make cut savings despite their I.T. legacy systems. We are also involved in helping them to gain the digital better of the customer experience by designing mobile application, looking at new use case and their overall customer experience. We are involved as well in data.

This is a key area where we have specialists helping banks. We also have specialists in the field of regulation, in the field of compliance and cybersecurity. We give a number of examples today. I would like to say a few thoughts then. On ESG, ESG, we have seen this topic becoming a major topic in the strategy of banks in a very short timeframe, maybe 2 to 3 years.

So, this is clearly one of the area with which they will concentrate their investment both on it, but also on innovative services. And we are convinced that the bank can play a major role in helping our society to become more sustainable. So here we are starting with a consulting approach to help them, for instance, to define eco projects that will help their clients to be more environmentally friendly.

We are also helping them with its solutions, for instance, to evaluate the impact of their IT systems. Currently, we are building a comprehensive consulting and solution offering for banks related to ESG. And finally, the last topic here on innovation and open banking, we will discuss extensively in our roundtable. It's maybe not as a major part of the client’s revenue yet, but we all know we have to continue to invest and to find new use cases and monetize those services.

Moving now to the two of the dimensions of our framework for financial services. We have a very short overview of the business lines that we address at banks. Banks are very large organizations, and we are more focused on their retail business. So, you see that for how we are addressing that digital. And I'm paying open banking department. We are we have a strong expertize, business expertize on lending and credit.

We support them for their payment operations, which are critical because they have a lot of interaction with our clients on payments. On compliance, we already touch a while, done this and of course digital channels on the tech capabilities. As you see, we are a very large tech company. So, we have a lot of capabilities that we can mobilize to support our clients.

I would just highlight one around the I.T. modernization and go to cloud. This is a very broad domain, and we know it's a hurt or today of the priorities of banks, CIOs and also chief executive officers. So, in this domain, we can include some application modernization projects. We include the data migration project. We include as well go to cloud strategies and implementation.

So, there are a lot of capabilities that we need to put together to make an assessment, see what should be the end result and game for this modernization of the I.T. system and build and support them in this journey. I think that we are probably one of the companies which gathers most of the capabilities to address these topics for large European banks.

And I just comment, I say if you want onto to others. So, the one on data, the one also on cyber, which are very important topic data, it comes also together with I and but it's not only about AI, it's also about data architecture, as we said, data migration and data platform and technological stacks. So, this was for the overview of how capabilities and offering for financial services.