Silver Lake merges Cegid and Silae into an accounting giant

Silver Lake has tightened its grip on a kind of Strait of Hormuz for French SMBs: payroll and accounting software. The firm has merged Cegid and Silae. According to its own framing, the move isn't about "scale synergies for the new group, valued at 10 billion euros, but revenue synergies."

Cegid and Silae merge. When accounting runs smoothly, does everything run smoothly, as Pennylanea French cloud accounting platform, claims in its TV and radio ads? 

The two companies, specialists in accounting management and payroll processing, both majority-owned by Silver Lake, have announced their merger. It's good news for Christian Lucas, Silver Lake partner, but not necessarily for SMBs and accounting firms, the clients caught at these two critical checkpoints: payroll and accounting. When accounting runs smoothly, does everything run smoothly?

Silae, largely unknown to the general public, helps process more than 8 million payslips a month for 2 million end clients and 15,000 accounting firms. After being acquired by Silver Lake, the software vendor tried to push through a steep price hike on its largely captive customer base, given its market share and product quality, announcing a nearly 280% rate increase over two years. At the same time, it had cut user-support staff, to the point of accumulating a backlog of hundreds of thousands of unanswered emails. Accounting firms had to pass these increases on to their clients, mostly SMBs. An agreement was eventually reached with Silae for more measured, phased-in increases. The accounting profession's governing body, like many others, paid a steep price for its failure to build software that could have served as an alternative.

When Alan, VMware, or Silae Hike Prices Overnight

En-Contact is therefore bringing back its 2024 article and will publish, in issue 141, a list of companies and vendors offering efficient payroll and accounting services, with affordable rates and responsive user support (actually reachable, and able to handle your request). They do exist. Here's one example, for payroll.

Earlier this year, as far as we're concerned, we chose to hand our payroll over to Liberty Paie. We'd simply had enough of paying more for our payslips every year , 27 euros per payslip, after repeated increases! For more on this, read our 2024 archive article covering the pricing practices of Alan, VMware, and Silae.

Large companies and mid-sized enterprises are also feeling the pinch from rising cloud costs, an estimated 140 billion euros in additional spending across Europe by 2030, according to a recent study commissioned by Cigref. "Don't become a prisoner of Salesforce," one major player in car distribution exclaimed, frustrated with the behavior of its longtime partner.

Majorel Africa, a Teleperformance Subsidiary, to Acquire Unifitel, a Crédit Agricole Partner

Crédit Agricole is preparing to sell Unifitel, its customer relations center in Casablanca, to Majorel Africa, a Teleperformance subsidiary set to acquire 100% of its capital and voting rights.

Moulay Hafid Elalamy, chairman of TP, the world's number-one call center operator, has become a major shareholder of the former Teleperformance following the unwinding of his equity swap position in the group. In parallel, through his Moroccan subsidiary Majorel Africa, he is set to acquire the Casablanca-based specialist in credit, debt collection, and BPO (outsourced customer services). The deal remains subject to approval from Morocco's Competition Council. Anthony Martins de Nobrega is Unifitel's CEO (see photo); the company is affiliated with Crédit Agricole's consumer finance arm.