Reval Moves into TMS Space with ecofinance Purchase

19 Jan 11

Reval, a provider of a single-version software-as-a-service (SaaS) solution for corporate financial risk management, has acquired ecofinance, a treasury management system (TMS) provider in central Europe. Established over 25 years ago, ecofinance has built development partnerships with clients and regional universities to deliver solutions mainly in its home markets of Germany, Austria and Switzerland.

In an interview with gtnews, Reval chief executive officer (CEO) and co-founder Jiro Okochi explained that the acquisition was in response to client demand: "As we moved across the functionality spectrum of what a corporate treasurer wants, our corporate clients began asking for a fully integrated TMS product." The company weighed the possibility of whether to build or buy the TMS functionality, and decided to buy when it came across ecofinance.

"ecofinance has a great cash and liquidity management platform and a robust payment factory and the product synergies are good. For example, ecofinance's ITS [Integrated Treasury System] web product is designed specifically to integrate with bank portals, so our product strategy works well because we can bring that into Reval's platform," he said.

The acquisition will give Reval a foothold in the Germanic market, which can be difficult for global vendors to establish due to the propensity of German companies to prefer to buy regionally and be supported in their language. ecofinance will continue to do business as 'ecofinance - a Reval company' and will operate from its headquarters in Graz, Austria.

First published on www.gtnews.com