Philippe Chambadal, head of DIFC Investment's acquisition vehicle DClear, has taken the reins at SmartStream after Ken Archer stepped down in February. DClear became SmartStream's parent company in November 2007 when DIFC stepped in to acquire the vendor after its aborted IPO. Chambadal's first major task as CEO has been overseeing the development and launch of a software-as-a-service (SaaS)-based delivery model for the company's TLM Reconciliations product.
The new service launched today, TLM OnDemand, takes the company's TLM reconciliation and exception managment platform that is installed in many large banks and buy side firms globally, and makes it accessible to small and medium sized firms on a transaction-based subscription pricing model.
This is the first step in the company's roadmap to more broadly embrace the SaaS model. It expects that in future its corporate actions and cash and liquidity management solutions will also be offered on this basis.
The company is working with NTT Europe Online as the data centre provider, and is providing the service on a multi-tenanted architecture to keep the costs for clients down. It expects to be announcing several new clients for the service in the coming months, and claims that its onboarding process has been streamlined to bring on new clients in just 20 days.
Philippe Chambadal, CEO of SmartStream, says: "TLM OnDemand is SmartStream's latest innovation and an integral part of our approach to helping clients' drive down their transaction costs. With firms demanding greater value from their IT investments TLM OnDemand provides a lower total cost of ownership (TCO) route to accessing our market leading applications."
Commenting on the launch, David Bradshaw, research manager, IDC, says: "The financial sector is embracing SaaS as a delivery model to ensure it can deploy software in a more cost-effective and timelier manner. In a recent survey of European companies, we found that 65% of financial sector companies were using SaaS in more than two of their critical business areas, compared to 52% of all companies in the survey. In this challenging economic climate, a cost-effective SaaS deployment option should be welcomed; for many organisations, especially small to mid-sized institutions, they remove the barriers to greater automation."
Ken Archer leaves SmartStream just over two years after being brought in from CSC by US private equity house TA Associates, which bought a majority stake in the company in September 2006. He leaves SmartStream in good shape, as it claims to have posted record revenues over the past six months despite the economic downturn.