The story begins when Mr. José Luis Torres-Vivanco (Founder and now Chairman of the Board of DYCSI) was working for one of the biggest banks in Mexico and realized the opportunity that existed in integrating the substantial number of interconnected systems that generated a sizable number of inconsistencies with End of Day operations. He called this integration discrepancies “the spaghetti of systems”. He saw different banks with IT departments of more than a hundred people doing manual checks for closings operations every day.
After his years in the banking world, he worked for several IT Consulting companies. While working for one of them, in the year 2000, the financial industry was going through a process of deregulation worldwide, and Mexico was no exception. He was at the time responsible for sales to the financial sector and realized that there was a good opportunity for offering a solution that could integrate all core processes of a financial institution in one system.
At that time, he undertook the task of finding a software that could manage the loans and deposits processes of financial intermediaries. Making a best of breed analysis of the main core banking software in the market, he found that SAP had recently developed a solution within the ERP that allowed, in a single system, to manage loans and deposits processes, integrated with accounting. In addition to this, he had the idea of offering this solution as a service, which at that time was something very daring since most companies continued to operate their systems servers inhouse. For this challenge, he started a journey to convince and form a strategic alliance between SAP as the software manufacturer, HP as the server provider and TRIARA as the data center operator.
In 2002, and after two years of conversations, he managed to bring together the actors with whom he could offer a solution that would allow Financial Intermediaries to operate the world’s leading ERP system through a service, which at that time was known as ASP (Applicaiton Service Provider) and today it is simply called Cloud Services.
Once he managed to convince SAP, HP and TRIARA, each one leader in their respective area, he set about finding an investment partner who believed in the project and invested in it. Throughout 18 months he was pitching the idea to different investors and finally managed to find one that financed the start of the company.
Once the alliance had been signed, and with the initial funding from the investor partner, they began, first to hire and train a team of consultants in SAP Banking, for which they had to be sent to Argentina, and later to go out to find the first customer, which they achieved. And in 2003 and they began to build the first version of FinoBank, the solution based on SAP CML (Consumer & Mortgage Loans) to manage the loans processes of a Mexican financial company. Hence came the implementation of the solution in two Credit Unions, for which, using the SAP BCA (Bank Customer Accounts) module, they had to build the solution to manage the processes of saving accounts and managing credit union members. In addition, being companies regulated by the banking authority in Mexico, they had to develop the regulatory reports required by the federal agency.
Then came the first great project and challenge of this nascent company. The solution had to be implemented for a pawn shop, the second largest in Mexico. For which it was necessary to travel to Spain first, to get to know the Monte Píos model well, and then convince the client to trust them, since they had no previous experience in this niche, for its implementation. The project lasted 9 months, plus 3 months of stabilization. In this blueprint they also had to develop a bank teller program and a garment valuation program based on standard modules such as SAP MM. It was a huge challenge for a company that at that time had no more than ten employees. However, despite the challenge, and focusing solely on this project, they successfully went live.
After this came the first great crisis of the company, which was about to send them into bankruptcy. The investing partner decided to withdraw his investment in the company that until then was called CT2000, which caused it to run out of liquidity, and for this reason Mr. Torres-Vivanco had to leave the company to find additional projects to inject the necessary cashflow to survive and being able to complete the payroll. That’s when the name of the company changed to Decision & Control Information Systems, the acronym of DYCSI in Spanish. Then he had to go to work at another software company to minimize the company’s costs while seeking out new customers. From 2006 to 2008 they were only able to add one or two new clients per year, which complicated the viability of the company. Many of those projects were sold at cost, just to be able to pay the payroll.
Between 2008 and 2009 two sons of Mr. Torres-Vivanco joined the project and decided to let go the company’s most expensive consultants and hire a two new graduate’s engineers and a functional consultant who had worked for one of the company costumers, she knew the system very well and could help them support to the rest of the customers. This renewed and most cost-efficient team managed to release an updated version of FinoBank, more advanced than the previous one, and began to incorporate customers at a higher speed in increasingly larger financial institutions.
The next big challenge, in 2012, was to implement the solution in a newer version of SAP, outside the central instance in which they had been operating since 2003 in the data center. It was a public company that was listed on the stock market with institutional processes in place, so the challenge was greater. They managed to get the project out successfully.
At that time (2013) SAP Mexico began to see DYCSI as a relevant player with, at the time, had more than twenty successful implementations within the world of SAP Banking and began to invite them to bid processes in which SAP was participating directly. A new project came where they had to implement the solution in the oldest financial institution in America and the biggest pawn shop in the country, founded even before Mexico became independent from Spain. It was an incredibly challenging project, because although it was for a new financial operation, without migration, it was a project that was required to be implemented in less than 6 months. It was accomplished and to this day remains the largest AMS customer DYCSI serves.
After this came the biggest and most challenging project they had faced up to that moment. A project that due to its size could have bankrupted the company. It was a project eight times bigger in budget and scope than the biggest implementation they had done up to that point. It consisted of implementing a complete bank, including all loan types, checking and saving bank accounts, the bank teller software, and a payment switch for debit cards. The project was planned to last 14 months and have a big bang of the entire bank in one weekend. Any core banking migration expert would have said it was a crazy idea, and it was, despite this they decided to go ahead and try it (risking the company in the attempt). The company went from 35 to 120 employees in less than a year. The project was delayed 3 months, however, the “step of death” occurred and on a spring Friday in 2015, at noon the bank’s operation was closed and the migration of clients, loans, accounts, balances, and systems began. And on next Monday at 8 AM the bank’s operation was opened using a new system. I’m not going to deny that there was pain the first few weeks, but if there is a lesson from this, it is that when you do a migration of this type, you should never turn back. You must loosen the ties and adapt to the new system. DYCSI lasted a year supporting the bank until they, with their own resources, oversaw the management of the new system. This was the culmination of the company up to that point.
After this, difficult years came (2016 to 2018) where they had to get smaller and look for new markets. They had a project in a financial institution that was acquired just at the time that they were starting to do functional tests, where the buying company decided to use its own IT system and abandon the project that they were about to finish. They were left with a heavy financial burden, and had to reduce the size of the team, which has an exceedingly difficult decision to make.
To overcome this financial challenge, in 2019 they decided to increase the scope of their SAP services offering and opened a new office in Austin, Texas to pursue international customers. They started to specialize in SAP Flexible Real Estate Management for IFRS 16 compliance and started a successful implementation in the world’s largest tortilla manufacturer. They joined forces with another SAP partner and help them in a project in Amman, Jordan. They helped with the migration support of a new SAP CML project in New York City. Subsequently, they implemented SAP Contract & Lease Management for IFRS 16 in two transnational companies and signed an alliance with SAP Germany to support AMS projects worldwide. They started a new SAP CML project in Miami and added another AMS client in Vacaville, California. The pandemic arrived, but they did not stop growing. They expanded their services reach to SAP Treasury Management and SAP Multibank Connectivity solutions. In 2021 they are implementing SAP CML for commercial lending in a producer of bakery food in Thomasville, Georgia. Also started implementing SAP CML and SAP Contract & Lease Management (Lease in and Lease out) for a battery marketing and distribution company in Dallas, Texas.
This year (2021) they formed an independent Board of Directors that is helping their corporate governance and their internationalization process. They are in the process of implementing the new SAP Cloud for Banking (C4B) solution based in SAP Banking Services in a neo-bank in Mexico and became an SAP Outsourcing Operations Partner getting certified by SAP as a Solutions Operations in S/4HANA to continue to expand their scope in AMS services provider.
The new SAP join venture for the financial services industry (SAP Fioneer) will help more financial institutions improve their processes, integrate their systems, transform digitally, and comply with the regulatory standards required by the authorities, and DYCSI is ready to accompany SAP on the way.
Big acknowledgement for everyone that has been part of the DYCSI’s journey.
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