Comarch targets international financial markets

The year 2010 will be a year of Comarch Capital Group’s foreign expansion. Nevertheless, Comarch will not resign from further exploration of domestic markets. Piotr Reichert, Comarch Vice President & Board Member, who is responsible for financial markets, talks about Comarch’s strategic plans in the banking, insurance and capital market sectors.

In 2010 we want to focus primarily on promoting our core systems and applications, which support life insurance sales, as well as front-office solutions for banking and insurance (multi-channel services). We will not, however, forget about our niche products such as the factoring system. We hold high hopes for selling our solutions outside Poland, especially corporate and mobile banking systems, which are very popular among our clients. We also want to develop applications that were designed to support capital markets, i.e. Comarch Custody and Comarch Asset Management, which supports activities of buy-side companies as well as a completely new system designed for sell-side clients. Many capital market institutions are getting ready to change their slightly outdated systems, so we do our best to develop our solutions in the most innovative way to meet our client’s needs.

In accordance with the strategy established two years ago, Comarch is actively developing on the German, Austrian and Swiss markets with the help of the SoftM company that has been owned by Comarch Capital Group since November 2008. The Banking, Insurance and Capital Markets unit is also planning to launch business activities on the Benelux, Scandinavian and Asian markets in 2010.

Regarding the German market, we are expanding our sales structure and competence centers in Munich, Frankfurt and Hamburg. Comarch‘s presence in Germany’s key financial centers is extremely important due to the diversity of their business models. The Benelux countries have become attractive to us, due to the high activity of life insurance and asset management companies on this market. We would like to conduct our European business activities with the help of our existing subsidiaries and strategic partners. We are primarily interested in large financial groups such as KBC, ING, Raiffeisen, Erste, Unicredit and Volksbank. Asia is a relatively new challenge and direction for our business unit. In 2009 we signed the first contract for the implementation of the Comarch Internet Banking system with one of the leading banks in Thailand, TMB, which belongs to the ING group. Asian markets are very promising. We want to make contact with local partners from other Comarch business units already operating on the Asian market. We are mostly interested in the Chinese, Singapore and Thai markets.

The Banking, Insurance and Capital Markets business unit has the second largest number of specialists in Comarch. Its clients include leading Polish banks, brokerage houses, investment and pension funds as well as insurance and factoring companies. The unit specializes in the integration of banking and insurance systems as well as in electronic banking, credit and asset management solutions. In the four quarters of 2009 the unit’s income accounted for 16.1% of the Comarch Capital Group’s total turnover and amounted to more than 117.4 million PLN.