My first Temenos’ assignment was in Madrid. It was a very large implementation at a Spanish branch of a big Swiss Bank. Late in the evening, straight after work, most of our team used to have dinner together in any of the terraces during that incredible hot summer. It was an intense project, full of challenges, and I considered still one of my best assignments ever.

However, my most vivid memory of these days is that in our eight members’ team we had 7 different nationalities and six different languages: Greek, English, Dutch, German, French and, of course, Spanish. Today, and according to its chairman, George Koukis, Temenos counts with a working force of 3500 employees from 100 different nationalities, "living in Harmony".

After almost 7 years at Temenos, implementing T24 at 17 Banks in 4 continents, I changed to Odyssey and I loved working in Geneva again. I loved working in French at Odyssey. Odyssey was not, however a provincial company. I enjoyed colleagues from Luxembourg, Paris, London and Brussels and many in the R&D team lived in France and worked in Geneva or Lausanne offices. I had my official introduction day in Luxembourg and I met an American colleague from the recently open New York office and other one from London. My first assignment was a CRM implementation at a big private Bank in Geneva, among my team I counted a consultant from China and one from India.

Nevertheless, during my 3 years tenure at Odyssey, I had the impression to work in a deep embedded European firm. Odyssey products’ support a highly sophisticated Banking business activity, which exists mainly in Geneva, Frankfort, Paris, Luxembourg, London, and other European countries, specialized in Wealth and Asset Management. The teams were composed mainly by business consultants and even the technical consultants have an impressive Banking Business knowledge.

Discussing the business
The point I’m raising here is a critical one: the integration of the Odyssey team into the cosmopolitan 100 nationalities world from Temenos. Since most of the readers of this blog are quite conversant with LinkedIn, I invite you to use a powerful feature called Company Statistics.

Where is going to be their new home?

Taking a close look to the Odyssey view, one can see that 308 of its employees are LinkedIn members, versus only 1,800 from the 3500 Temenosians. But the really staggering difference is the geographical distribution of both companies’ locations, which pre-announces a challenging integration for the Odyssey team, already pointed out by some newspapers (like the Handelszeitung) making reference to the Viveo employees who still are fighting against the rationalization programs, following the "successfully" integration from last year.

(to be continued)