Software maker SAP plans to collaborate with SunGard, the industry leader in banking software, it said on Monday, as it pushes to expand its financial services business.
SAP's banking chief told Reuters that SAP aimed to become the world's third-biggest supplier of banking software applications in the next three to five years as banks come round to the idea of buying in standard software.
SAP said at a showcase event for customers in Vienna the first product of the two companies would be a software package for asset liability management, to be launched first in Europe. It did not specify a time frame.
"This is the first step in what we hope will become a fruitful partnership between SAP and SunGard," SunGard's financial systems chief Harold Finders said in a statement.
SAP, the world's biggest maker of business software, has cornered the market in many industries, but banks - which still often prefer software they have developed themselves - are a hard nut to crack, SAP's Thomas Balgheim said in an interview.
Balgheim, who is responsible for everything concerning banking software at the German company - from development to field sales - said sales to the banking industry were growing "significantly faster" than the SAP average.
But retail banks, with the highest proportion of self-developed software of any industry, are reluctant to move their core banking operations onto standard software, fearing damaging interruptions to services, he said.
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