Fiducia & GAD IT AG is a German IT company that specialises in data centre services for the banking and finance industry. It is made up of the former Fiducia IT AG and GAD eG and was renamed following their long awaited merger in January 2015.
Despite its specialisation in cooperative banks and finance companies, Fiducia & GAD is keen to attract more clients from the public and private sectors, especially those in the private finance industry. It offers tailored data processing, colocation, private cloud and outsourced IT services to businesses and organisations. Through its subsidiaries, Fiducia & GAD offers an extensive range of specialised software and hosted applications, as well as applications for the customers of its customers like its secure mobile banking applications.
Fiducia & GAD IT currently operate two main banking systems Fiducias agree and Gads bank21. Agree is the industry standard banking system across Germany but bank21 also caters for a large number of banking customers. Following the merger both systems are to be rolled into a new system named agree21 and customers will start switching over from spring 2016.
Location
Fiducia & GAD IT AG is headquartered in both Karlsruhe and Munster, with further offices in Munich, Frankfurt am Main and Berlin. It owns and operates two Fiducia data centres in the Karlsruhe area which are fully redundant and offer space for almost 9000 servers.
The newer Fiducia data centre was built in 2008 in Rhine Stetten, Karlsruhe, approximately ten kilometres away from the original data centre site. The older data centre became a back-up on its inauguration.
On its merger, Gad eG brought its own state of the art Munster based data centre into the fold, along with its 400+ cooperative banking customers.
All Fiducia & Gad data processing centres are Level 4 certified excellent by TUV the level required by most banks and financial institutions. Power and cooling is fully redundant and all data is backed up continuously at the second Karlsruhe data centre.
Energy
Fiducia & GAD Ag operate a corporate social responsibility policy, which includes donating old hardware to social groups in Karlsruhe and Munster and taking environmental impact into account when making business decisions.
Within the data centre environment, cooling and power technology is selected as much for its performance and reliability as its energy efficiency.
Funding/business model
Fiducia & GAD IT Ag is a German limited company with all shares owned by affiliated companies, cooperatives and minor shareholders in other industries. It owns a number of complementary subsidiaries that offer software, IT services and risk management and is a shareholder in nine other related banking and IT companies in Germany.
Fiducia & GAD IT Ag currently employs around 5,600 people in Germany and enjoys annual revenues EUR 1.26 Billion. Its expansion plans involve attracting clients from the private sector, public sector and private banking companies.
The idea to merge Fiducia and GAD began in 2006 and has been on and off the cards since. The merger finally went ahead in January 2015 with the aim of achieving substantial financial and operational synergies. The savings from combining the two companies is expected to around EUR 125 per year.
Customers and partners
Fiducia & GAD IT specialises in providing data centre and IT services to banks and financial service companies in the Cooperative Financial Network in Germany (Finanzgruppe). It counts all 1,100 Volksbank and Raiffeisenbank members of the cooperative as customers, including DZ Bank, Union Investment and RV Bank Rhein-haardt.
It also provides its services to private financial services companies, private banks, the public sector and corporations. Its private clients include the ADAC, Europes biggest automobile membership club.
Fiducia & GAD IT has agreed to sell a substantial number of shares in its ELAXY group subsidiary to Swiss digital banking software firm CREALOGIX as part of a long-term collaborative partnership between the two companies.
A highly secure and trusted data centre services provider
Fiducia & GAD IT operates in a very niche market, but whilst it predominantly serves financial clients, its offering is extremely attractive to businesses seeking the highest levels of data security and availability.
Comprehensive support, tailored business services and data centre technologies trusted by more than 1000 German banks and financial institutions are amongst some of the benefits of using Fiducia services. There is also the matter of Germanys data protection laws amongst the strictest in Europe and a major draw for companies who want to protect their clients and their own data.