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Dan Zilberman represents Warburg Pincus on Avaloq's board. He spoke to finews.com about the massive Raiffeisen technical migration and when private equity firm plans a stock listing for Avaloq.

Dan Zilberman, run me through the successes and failures at Avaloq since Warburg Pincus took a stake 18 months ago.

We’ve professionalized the management team. Part of that is the transition from our founder and chairman, Francisco Fernandez to Juerg Hunziker, our new CEO. This is Francisco Fernandez’s baby, so the transition takes time. We clinched a key contract in Germany with Apobank  [Apotheker- und Aerztebank]. We expect to hit our budget this year, and revenue is up 8 percent on the year.

Where have things stalled or aren’t going exactly to plan?

Sometimes it’s three steps forward and two steps back. We won a large number of new contracts, but also lost two new contracts we would have liked to win – one due to a two-year delay in making a decision.

«We hope to migrate Raiffeisen by year-end»

 All in all, we’re very much going in the right direction

How’s your biggest project, the migration of 246 Raiffeisen banks, going?

In our original plan we thought we would be mostly done by now. We’re not – we’ve migrated 101 Raiffeisen banks to the new system, and hope to have them all done by year-end.

The Raiffeisen banks are similar and belong to the same cooperative. What’s the hold-up?

We had one delay related to the mortgage functionality, which was caused by the software parameterization, not by the Avaloq software itself. This issue has been solved.

«Moved slower than everyone would like»

In fairness, tech projects usually move slower than you want them to. And this is the mother of all tech projects – it’s the largest tech migration ever.

How has the criminal probe of Raiffeisen’s ex-CEO and the management changes at the bank affected the project?

Personally I could imagine that, for any firm, such developments have the potential to interfere with other priorities. In this specific situation, we can only speculate what would have happened otherwise. Either way, things have moved a little slower than everyone in the project would like.