A leading core banking and insurance software provider recorded 14.7% growth in 2014

Interview with Joe Faddoul, Chairman of BML Istisharat

Thank you for your time today. It’s good to see you again. First of all can you tell us about the growth over the last year?

We achieved about 14.7% growth in our sales figures last year.

Has your sales strategy changed? What are the new markets that you have entered recently?

We recently entered a much unexpected market, it was not part of our strategy but it was an opportunistic approach. We were called to computerise the new bank in Somalia. We had some concerns about sending people to Somalia but after all it went well and the bank is now up and running. It was the International Bank of Somalia and it was of course our first inroad into Somalia and I think it is the first private bank in Somalia.

Do you plan to expand to regions and countries around there?

 We find it difficult to plan for some countries but we will continue our opportunistic approach.

Can you talk a bit about the Malta deal and perhaps some other important deals that happened recently?

We don’t even have a distributor in Malta. The Malta deal came out of our ranking in IBS and the Gartner Magic Quadrant. They called us and asked for a demo so we sent people over and we got the deal. We were competing with the main international competitors namely with the Legacy System, a Greek company called Intrasoft and I-flex. The Malta APS bank is supposed to go live at the end of the first quarter of 2016. It is going according to plan and we discovered the country; we now have plans to expand in Malta. I think we can have one or two more banks in Malta.

Which area are you targeting?

We want to consolidate in our main market which is the Middle East and the MENA region. We have some prospects in Indonesia due to our Malaysian distributor. We are just waiting to finalise our Malaysian client, for the bank to go live, and then we will expand in Indonesia. We are going to continue in Malta and we also have some prospects in Algeria and Sudan, which is the MENA region mainly.

What is your current ranking in the IBS and the Gartner Magic Quadrant? What is your target?

Our ranking in the IBS has been for the last ten years between eight and eleven for worldwide universal banking. In the Magic Quadrant we are in the niche company´s square. We are trying to improve this and I think that in this year’s results we will do better than last year.

Why are your software and products better than the T24 from Temenos?

Well we don’t say that it is better, we say that it is more convenient in certain circumstances; mainly due to its local practices, the quantity of functionalities and the technology. Again we don’t say that it is better, we say that for the middle sized banks in the MENA we have had some indices that say we are preferred to the big ones like Temenos, I-flex etc.

How do you differentiate from the others?

We are more flexible because we are small. Our reactivity and agility is recognised as being better than the big ones. When a client wants something new or an amendment, we don’t take 8 months to answer them, we answer them after 8 hours. We are also very modular, so the client is not obliged to buy a big product in order to use only 10% of it; he buys only what he needs. It is like the difference between a boutique hotel and a big chain hotel; you can go to a Holiday Inn with 2,000 rooms or you can go to a boutique hotel with 60 rooms; you will be better pampered in a boutique hotel and that is our main difference with the big players. We personally know all of our clients. We have clients that have been with us for over 30 years, which is an indication and that includes Fortune 500 names.

With everything that is going on around the region and inside the country, how is it affecting you? Do you suffer from this turbulence?

Not really because even in the turbulent countries there are operations that are still going on. I mean the banks are still operating even in Syria and Iraq. The insurance companies are also still operating. Obviously there are more difficulties but they are still operating because the day to day life cannot stop. We feel it in the sense that there are no new clients in those countries but we are still supporting our clients who are still operating. It is true that in one or two countries there are problems but there are other countries and we are going to them.

How are your sales of other products evolving? What is your strategy?

We were pioneering the bancassurance industry. Because of the deregulation the banks and insurance companies are practically selling the same products in the same networks. So we are capitalising on this issue and we are now expanding in North Africa with bancassurance and I hope to announce a new deal in Algeria very soon.

Is there anything that you would like to add?

It is not a matter of promoting but I would like to stress that we are leading in some areas. For example, our first tablet application goes back to six or seven years ago; we developed something with Intel and we are now very comfortable with it  but for other companies it is just the beginning. We also have mobility for both Android and Apple phones, so we have full banking applications on those. I think we are comfortable with the new technological trends for the banking and insurance.