Douglas Blakey meets with Raja Gopalakrishnan, executive vice president of International Markets for FIS, responsible for the firm’s performance outside North America. Gopalakrishnan says FIS’ acquisition of SunGard creates one of the broadest sets of technology assets and market expertise in the industry
A ten year FIS veteran, Raja Gopalakrishnan manages FIS’ International Markets across the four key regions of Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA), Latin America and Asia Pacific.
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Prior to assuming his current role, Gopalakrishnan managed the Asia Pacific market where, over a period of five years, he built one of the highest-growth businesses for the company, successfully establishing FIS as a fintech leader across multiple markets.
Earlier roles with FIS also included developing and building the Global Outsourcing business in North America and Europe.
Before joining FIS, Gopalakrishnan spent more than 10 years in retail and commercial banking with Bank of America and ABN AMRO.
So it is fair to say that on his travels, Gopalakrishnan has experienced a fair amount of M&A activity; but he is especially energised by the potential offered by FIS’ acquisition of SunGard.
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By GlobalData“From a market perspective, the deal means that we will offer the broadest combination of assets on the banking and payments and side as well as wholesale and institutional.
“With the combination [of FIS and SunGard] we can offer customers big or small, the entire spectrum of financial services technology.
“It should mean more innovation and more value add services and it should mean future proofing and reducing risk and bring down the total cost of ownership for clients for like to like.”
The combined firm will continue under a sole FIS brand strategy.
“The FIS brand is core to our go-to-market strategy and recognised by clients all over the world.”
FIS, with 13,000 clients will grow to 20,000 clients post acquisition and says Gopalakrishnan, customers will benefit from more innovation, more value add services, future proofing, reduced risk, with the ultimate benefit of a reduction in the total cost of ownership for like to like.
“The beautiful thing about this acquisition is that from a front end market perspective there is a huge amount of complimentary. We were operating in very different markets and there is almost no overlap from a customer as well as a product proposition perspective.
“It is a case of adding one plus one and getting more than two.
“We will definitely look at opportunities of consolidation and synergy as far as infrastructure goes – how can we do more with our infrastructure.
“But for now, the exciting opportunity for us is to take products that both organisations bring to the table and immediately start offering them to each other’s customers for cross sell and upsell and increase share of wallet opportunities.
“The new leadership teams are announced and it is business as usual.”
For 2016, Gopalakrishnan identifies three key priorities.
“First off, we must offer customers from both organisations access to the entire breadth of our solutions and ensure that best practice from both firms is engrained.
“Secondly, we need to make sure the organisation that has seen change can seamlessly integrate and have the platform to go for future growth. The key ingredient is the talented employees that we have.
“Just in the international business alone, we will have over 25,000 employees across 130 countries.
“We have to integrate them and make sure we keep them focussed on the right things.
“And thirdly, we must look for all different points of opportunity for consolidation in terms of infrastructure and relationships on the vendor side and leverage purchasing power and bring efficiency into the business to allow us to achieve a level of margin expansion.”
For Gopalakrishnan, SunGard has three key strengths: “A very strong customer relationship base, a very strong sales culture and market leadership in intellectual property.”
While a number of the start-up banks are opting to develop their IT in-house as opposed to partnering with major service providers such as FIS – Mondo and Starling are two such examples – Gopalakrishnan argues that FIS’ offering is most appropriate for the new entrant sector.
He continues: “The FIS proposition to start-ups is this: we have the scale, the infrastructure, the track record, the credibility and all of the intellectual property embedded into our proposition.
“Mr New Banker should focus on the front end, the product, should focus on building the customer base, distribution, treasury and capital management and risk management.
“Let us take care of the entire back end and many elements of your delivery which beyond a point are frankly commoditised and do not really differentiate you.
“The new banks will have to process hundreds and thousands of transactions every day without error without fraud without risk without breakdowns and we can provide all of that.
“Looking ahead over the next one to three years, I see three key areas of particular interest: payment hubs, on demand banking or the banking utility and digital banking -and of course the ongoing move to becoming a one stop shop for the banks.”
Of these, digital is the most emergent and is happening in real time, he adds.
“The emphasis right now is on agility – there is an element of everyone, banks and vendors, playing leapfrog.
“The reason why banks will work with us as a digital provider not only relates to the specific digital offering that we bring to the table: that is very competitive.
“This is our business and we have been in this business for 40 years – this is what we do for a living.
“If you talk about digital embedded in the entire environment and ecosystem of banking on demand and payments, it talks to all of it. No one else is able to bring all of those pieces and assets to bear.”
