Traditionally there have been two approaches, best of breed, i.e. a “Third Party” Subledger like the Aptitude Accounting Hub or the Legerity FastPost solution.  Which had the benefits of being fit for purpose for an industry vertical (e.g. Banking or Insurance IFRS 17) but had the downside of decoupling from the GL and complex integration for “drill back” from summary GL data to detail Subledger data.

The single stack approach, was traditionally ruled by the ERP vendors such as Oracle or SAP and offered customers a “one-stop shop” and “one throat to choke”, playing to the Bank or Insurers’ IT department desire for technology standards and removing integration headaches. However the CFO office for the more complex Banking and Insurance customers would often struggle to work with ERP Sub Ledgers such as Oracle FAH or SAP’s Bank / Insurance Analyser and more recently FPSL.

There has also been some shifts in this traditional picture, with Legerity being acquired by Integrity Software and Aptitude having launched a new product (Fynapse) which is now closely coupled with the Microsoft Dynamics 365 platform. Then there is another new entrant to the market in Photon Software (which full disclosure is a current partner of G2M), which with the Photon Financial Hub Cloud for SAP offers a lighter, public cloud, Financial Services specialist option for SAP customers.   Workday has also emerged as a viable ERP platform, having made the leap across from the HR function with Workday Financials and the Accounting Center as their version of the Sub Ledger.

So it feels like the best of breed / “Third Party” options are not as obvious and perhaps arguably not as necessary with now the option of 4 viable ERP stacks in the market.   The question still remains I think for many large and or complex Financial Services is how viable is the “single stack” ERP Subledger / Accounting Hub capability for their industry specific requirements, products and volumes.  

I’m looking forward to how this plays out.  With Photon I can see how it could be a game charger certainly for SAP users, bringing a best of breed Financial Services Subledger solution to a trusted single stack like SAP and helping their customers move to the public cloud.   It will be interesting to see if Microsoft with it’s partnership with Aptitude Fynapse can crack the Tier 1/2 Financial Services market or will it continue to swim in the lower tier lanes of Financial Services or will it indeed continue to have more success in other sectors.  Will Workday with its huge marketing machine, replicate some of its success in the US Banking and Insurance Market into Europe.  I noted some PR recently from Coventry Building Society and Workday, which shows they are active.

Interesting times indeed…