Atos’ recent analyst event in Boston provided insight into its roadmap for 2017-2019. This note focuses specifically on its digital roadmap for the banking and financial services sector.

While financial services is Atos' smallest industry segment (17% of 2016 revenues), it was Atos' fastest growing vertical in Q4 2016, delivering 10.6% organic growth versus 1.9% for the group overall. Worldline, its payments business, delivered 3.3% organic growth. 

Atos is looking to maintain this growth and move more aggressively into digital services, based on four broad offers under the umbrella of Digital Transformation Factory:

• Hybrid orchestration cloud
• SAP HANA
• Digital Workplace
• Atos Codex

Within each of these, Atos is developing uses cases relevant for specific target sectors.

With its Digital Transformation Factory offerings to the banking sector (spanning retail, commercial, and capital markets), Atos is focusing on a few (likely six to seven) opportunities where it can dominate the market with a differentiated offering. Examples of areas where Atos has current offerings include:

• Digital Workplace: Atos is delivering digital workplace services for several European banks with multi-lingual communications and collaboration services to support their cross-border delivery
• PSD 2 regulation: this European regulation, which opens payments platforms to all processors, will become effective later this year. Banks will need to invest in modernizing their processing capabilities and reducing the cost of processing. Atos Worldline is making those investments, and will be white labeling processing capabilities for banks and startups
• Blockchain: in banking, Atos has focused on retail payments and cryptocurrency. It has delivered multiple POCs in Bitcoin over the past few years, with the focus on:
  • Colored coins: the use of Bitcoin blockchain to manage real world assets (e.g. theater tickets, car rentals, loyalty benefits), and digital assets (e.g. songs, and movies)
  • Multi-signature: required use of multiple signatures to confirm a blockchain transaction. An example is corporate expenses incurred requiring two signatures
  • Going forward, Atos will focus its blockchain efforts on enterprise users. As such, it will work with banks to deliver blockchain services such as colored coin or multi-signature, which can be used by enterprises to create trusted participants in a bank managed environment.

Atos is drawing large resources from FinTech product partners and acquisitions and focusing those resources in areas where it can create offerings with either little competition or where it dominates a market (e.g. electronic payments in Europe with Worldline). It should be able to grow its banking industry revenues faster than its overall revenues. The banking industry is in the process of a generational change to new business models, competitors, and new methods of processing. This provides an excellent opportunity for Atos to continue growing its banking business faster than the rest of its business for the next five years and longer.