At Temenos Community Forum 2024, one word would define a company who appear to be on the cusp of a bright new chapter.
“We cannot succeed as a company unless we succeed as a community,” said Temenos’ new CEO, Jean-Pierre Brulard in his opening talk, highlighting the importance of the many relationships that form their particular section of the banking ecosystem.
The banking technology provider’s flagship annual event puts community front and centre and this year’s edition in Dublin, Ireland was no different.
In his enthusiastic address, Brulard reinforced his point about the importance of the 1400 attendees, which included banks, fintechs, partners and Temenosians themselves, by saying “nothing would have been possible without everyone in this room. And nothing will be possible without you in the future. Because, you are Temenos.”
On the important role that Temenos plays he pointed out that “the successful software industry has two ingredients, customer centricity and innovation.”
Judging by the panel that followed, hosted by President, International William Moroney it would appear their customers agree. Composed of representatives from Commerce Bank in the US, ABN AMRO and Mauritius Commercial Bank, the panel explored the different ways Temenos systems had helped them to achieve success in their respective markets.
For Commerce Bank, Temenos has played a pivotal role in helping them gain access to the FedNow faster payments service, a partnership which was announced alongside the conference. Marlou Jenniskens from ABN AMRO highlighted the importance of optionality and made the interesting point that banks are approaching a time of great change and therefore must adapt.
“There’s a great wealth transfer ongoing. Trillions in assets will move from the Baby Boomer generation to their children and we’ve noticed that they have very different customer demands. So customers are looking for something different.”
As a result, a more holistic, personalised service is needed, something the Temenos cloud-native solutions can help with.
Product innovation, leveraging Gen AI, Cloud and SaaS
The next big session of the first day was from President of Product and COO Prema Varadhan. This was the start of a number of major product announcements including their Responsible Generative AI solutions for banks. AI would be mentioned significantly across the two days, which is probably not surprising but this was certainly a timely announcement.
From everything we were shown, there is a real purpose behind their offering. Through a number of demos, including one introduced by Varadhanand headed up by Chief Science Officer Hani Hagras, they showed banking-specific use cases of secure GenAI and how the Temenos proposition could provide a serious boost to productivity. It’s hard to think of a better example of customer centricity and innovation colliding.
Hagras was keen to point out how they are genuine pioneers in the area.
“Today we are introducing to the market the first generative AI solution for the banking sector. It comes pre-built, pre-configured, deployment agnostic and ready to go. What this means for you is that starting now you can actually put it on top of your Temenos data and different kinds of Temenos ecosystems and generate a return on investment from day one.”
Varadhan stressed that they want to deliver a “safe, transparent, unbiased and environmentally friendly way of using AI.” She went on to explain how they plan on doing this, by including humans in the process. Essentially it’s about taking data and allowing people to easily interface with it.
“Temenos Explainable AI offers transparent, auditable insights while our Generative AI infused platform delivers these insights instantly in an intelligent and personalised way,” she explains.
The first morning session also had an important address from CTO, Tony Coleman who further explains the disruptive technologies that can impact banking. His big announcement is about the release of Temenos Positions, another new offering from the company which serves as a real-time source for maintaining and sharing balances, instruments, and financial movements across an entire bank’s system landscape, regardless of underlying technology stack.
Again, in an effort to ease the impact of disruption, he points out that this is designed to be a starting point for progressive modernisation or evolution, slowly but surely being in a better position to offer competitive service.
“Even if your cores are not available in real time, even if they don’t have API enablement, we have mechanisms to get that data to flow through to Temenos Positions so that you get that critical, enterprise wide view in real time.”
The morning finished with a final talk from one of their key technology partners, Microsoft who added further context to the AI hype surrounding banking today. There’s no escaping it and according to VP Darren Hardman, there’s a huge opportunity to be had for banks; apparently a 3.5x average return for every $1 they invest in AI, over the last 12-18 months.
Anticipating needs, not just solving problems
As well as further product demos and breakout sessions, highlights from the Plenary on Day 2 included an insightful panel, made up of Temenos Chief Strategy Officer Kanika Hope, Dan Broten from EQ Bank, and Benjamin Ensor from 11:FS, looking at the main market trends impacting banking today.
There were also further examples of how their AI software could change the game, with Global Head of Temenos Business Solutions Group Arun Thallapelly making one of the clearest cases for the increased use of the technology.
“With Generative AI you’re not just going to be solving problems, you’re going to be anticipating needs.”
This was paired with more talk about the importance of sustainability, something that Temenos is also leading on. Chief Marketing and ESG Officer Kalliopi Chioti was joined on stage by EQ’s Dan Broten to discuss how working together is helping to decarbonize the bank and quantify their emissions through the Temenos Carbon Calculator.
Leaner is greener and the results of a new Sustainability Benchmark with Microsoft showed the efficiency of Temenos’ cloud-native platform to handle the variable demands of digital transactions, while also supporting banks to meet their sustainability goals.
This year’s Temenos Community Forum has come with no shortage of announcements but also a sense from the inside that this is a company which does a great job of balancing customer and innovation and has a thriving ecosystem around it.
A bright future awaits.