SAP’s $150 million banking megadeal

Canada’s ATB Financial is pursuing a $150 million project to rip out its legacy systems, some of which date back to the 1970s, in favor of SAP.

Given that SAP also added Bank of America as a customer earlier this year, the deal points to SAP’s growing strength in the North American segment of the banking sector. Like Bank of America, ATB appears to have conducted thoughtful diligence on its SAP. A thoughtful article in Bank Technology News points out that ATB took nearly a decade evaluating the market and testing the market before signing up with SAP, and is carrying clear-cut, achievable objectives into the deal.

Other firms considering SAP would do well to adopt the banking sector’s risk sensitivity to enterprise software adoption, which includes longer evaluation times, weighted functionality priorities, and unambiguous project objectives. ATB appears to have squeezed every last bit of scalability out of its thirty year-old legacy system before settling on SAP, which is an object lesson to companies who feel obliged to make major system switches every decade or so.

Like ATB, a lot of banks are running up on sunset dates for their old systems. All eyes in the industry must be on ATB to see how the SAP project goes, because it could influence a lot of upcoming purchasing decisions.

Demir Barlas, Site Editor