Documens Boss

BancTec acquires Beta Systems AG

Berlin, June 3, 2010 – Beta Systems Software AG has today sold its Enterprise Content Management (ECM) Line of Business (LoB) to the BancTec Group. In its extraordinary meeting which took place yesterday, the Supervisory Board authorized the Management Board to conclude the negotiations. The purchase agreement pertaining to the takeover of 100% of the shares in Beta Systems ECM Solutions GmbH, Augsburg, was signed today with BancTec GmbH, Langen, and BancTec, Inc., Dallas, Texas/USA. At the same time, the assets assigned to this LoB in the USA and Austria were to be sold to the BancTec Group. The completion of the sale is to take place swiftly. Confidentiality has been agreed by both parties in respect of further details of the purchase agreement.

Document Boss view:

The acquisition of the ECM division of Beta Systems by US based BancTec further strengthens their vision of building a range of services and solutions that will provide stiff competition for the purely European technology vendors within the ECM and BPM sector who are still too small to take the lead in this market.
Companies such as Open Text, Oracle and also BancTec prove to have developed a successful growth strategy, which includes acquisitions to quickly ramp up their market share and access to new clients, leaving European technology firms chasing.

Acquisitions such as this one are in-line with the general trend of larger scale pan-European and global operations, to support large internationally operating clients who prefer a single point of contact with one vendor, instead of best of breed with local vendors in each region.

This acquisition will reinforce additional pressure on to the European ECM and BPM vendors, to decide now if they want to become part of this consolidation or join forces with and be one of the parties driving such market consolidation.

The majority of the European technology vendors have revenues between €20M and €40M. There are many US based companies competitors such as BancTec who are considerably bigger and have the size and financial punch to have an impact by consolidating the smaller stars within the sector.

Main points:

1. The acquisition reflects BancTec core strategy which is to build a global, portfolio of solutions and services that automate and simplify high-volume, payment, document and data-intensive processes for the world’s leading organisations.
2. BancTec holds a very strong position in the payment and document processing markets within Western Europe and the US. Therefore, the two organisations should create an even broader range of enterprise-wide multi-national document and payment processing solutions.
3.  The acquisition will also help BancTec delivery further resources, including additional project and delivery teams and allow them to offer advanced payment, mail processing solutions and outsourced services for a variety of document driven business processes.
4.  It strengthens BancTec's business in Germany (& Central Europe), Europe's largest and most resilient market. BancTec is not new in the German region but with this acquisition they have put themselves in a very strong position for advanced and complex solutions around document and data-intensive processes.
5.  Beta have a strong customer base that BancTec will be able to leverage with its BPO model that will allow the 'new' combined company to generate revenue growth.

 Comment from BancTec

Mike Peplow - Senior Vice President and President, Europe, Middle East and Africa for BancTec commented earlier today to Document Boss

 'I am really excited about the prospect of combining the resources and skills of Beta ECM and BancTec to create a leading Document & Payment company servicing the German and Central European markets'