In addition, the Swiss bank has reached an agreement to buy Avaloq’s 49% stake in their IT joint venture Arizon Sourcing. The venture was created to migrate Raiffeisen to Avaloq’s IT platform.
Raiffeisen Switzerland stated that Arizon will be fully integrated in the first half of this year and in the future, it will further develop and operate the platform for itself.
With Arizon’s acquisition, Raiffeisen stated that 253 banks including 246 Raiffeisen banks, six branches and the central bank will now be operated on one platform. This platform will be available to all 11,000 employees at 900 separate Raiffeisen sites throughout Switzerland.
Raiffeisen Switzerland chief operating officer and the executive board member Rolf Olmesdahl said: “This new core banking system allows us to provide our employees with a new platform. With this, Raiffeisen Switzerland is laying the foundation for the agile implementation of future digital projects.
“After completion of the migration, for strategic reasons we wanted Raiffeisen Switzerland– and contrary to the original plan – to be able to operate and further develop the banking platform ourselves in the future. In the context of this transaction, accruals of CHF 69 million were set up, which are included in the special items of CHF 300 million reported in the year end results of the Raiffeisen group for 2018. We would like to thank everyone at Avaloq and ARIZON who has been involved in the project for their constructive and professional work.”
Avaloq CEO Jürg Hunziker said: “We are very proud of what we have achieved together with Raiffeisen and ARIZON. This project was the largest in Avaloq’s history and is a milestone in the timeline of both the company and the entire financial sector. To date, no other fintech and software company has succeeded in migrating 253 banks to the same platform. This shows that Avaloq technology meets all the requirements of a tier 1 bank.”
Last month, the Swiss fintech company partnered with METACO, a crypto-asset custody infrastructure company and Gazprombank to implement an integrated crypto asset solution.
The aim of this product is to offer banks and wealth managers a fully integrated solution to manage client portfolios across all asset classes such as cryptocurrencies. Gazprombank (Switzerland) Ltd, which is already an Avaloq client, aims to offer a cryptocurrency service to its clients from the middle of this year.
