Core Sales Rankings 2015: Global Sales

The evolution of core banking is changing the market for core platform sales. The rate of conversion is slowing down in almost every region, due in large part to advancements in implementation methodology, where institutions are leveraging middleware, componentization, and modular solutions to circumvent larger migration projects. The cost/benefit analysis of migration isn’t compelling enough to convince many CIOs that the time is right. Market demands can still largely be supported, despite legacy cores.

Vendors have responded, moving toward delivery models that cater to this methodology. Modular implementations have grown by more than 21% over the previous year, while hosted deals have grown by more than 15%. A move toward cloud adoption will have a positive effect on migrations, but currently banks are reluctant to implement cloud on anything more than ancillary, noncore components.

In the report Core Sales Ranking 2015: Global Sales, Celent ranks core vendors based on total assets and deals signed, covering the calendar year between July 1, 2013 and June 30, 2014.

Core banking migration has historically been a high-risk proposition. For many, this has stalled any large IT investments and platform migrations. The intended scope of these projects is subject to a large amount of internal stakeholder scrutiny, and increasingly major investments are being approached incrementally, with carefully defined and short-term ROI.

Vendors have evolved to meet these needs. Componentization and service integration standards are starting to change the mindset of midsize and large institutions. Yet the evolution of the core platform is having reverberations on the nature of what´s considered a core implementation.

The needs of financial institutions vary greatly from country to country, and those country-specific requirements can be the determining factor for a vendor’s success or failure.

“Global vendors have made flexibility a top priority for capturing different market segments across the globe,” says Stephen Greer, an analyst with Celent’s Banking practice and coauthor of the report. “Yet competition and vendor consolidation portend more disruption in traditional segments. Markets long dominated by niche or local players are seeing foreign competition slowly move in. Solutions not optimized for specific bank types are being modified to appeal to a wider audience.”

This report looks at core platform sales in the market, breaking them down by vendor and region. It contains 68 figures and 13 tables.