The largest Swiss Fintech company took important milestones in 2018 in the past year. The Avaloq wreath has both light and shadow.
It was the first business year under the aegis of the new Avaloq CEO Jürg Hunziker. In December 2017, the founder of banking IT specialists, Francisco Fernandez, retired to the presidium. In 2018, Hunziker’s team, seconded by US major investor Warburg Pincus, was able to show what they can do.
The new Avaloq leadership managed at least partially, as the result published on Tuesday showed. So growth has picked up again. Group sales rose to 579 million francs, which corresponds to an increase of 6 percent compared to the previous year. In 2017, the growth of the software company used to double digit rates in previous years was only 3 percent.
Less profit before taxes
By contrast, pretax profit Ebitda fell from 100 million to 90 million last year. The cash holdings also decreased compared to 2017 from 180 to 144 million francs. The definite turnaround is Hunziker & Co not yet succeeded.
The Fintech managed to reach an important milestone last year. The major project Rainbow, the migration of 253 Swiss Raiffeisen banks to a single process platform. This went live at the end of last year after delays and setbacks. The tremendous endeavor had also tied many resources at Avaloq, which should now be free again.
Last January, Raiffeisen announced that it would completely take over the joint project company Arizon. And continue to develop the IT platform on its own initiative. In connection with the transaction, the bank repaid 69 million francs.
Movement in the cloud
Avaloq 2018 has just tackled another major project. Last June, Avaloq and US IT giant IBM announced plans to jointly build the data cloud for Swiss banks, the Swiss Banking Cloud. To this end, 23 Avaloq employees joined IBM. As it said on Tuesday, migration of existing software and outsourcing customers to the cloud is expected to begin in the course of 2019. This with the ambition to implement the model also in Europe, Middle East, Africa and Asia.
Avaloq is also building its future with its own crypto plant solution. Last December, the banking IT manufacturer and Fintech Metaco merged with the Swiss branch of Russian Gazprombank.
In addition, the acquisition of conventional banks remains important. New customers included Intesa Sanpaolo, Smith & Williamson and the Chinese Industrial Bank in 2018.