BOQ and Virgin Money live with Temenos core banking system in the cloud

Bank of Queensland (BOQ) has gone live with a new cloud-based core banking system, supplied by banking tech vendor Temenos, for its retail operations under the BOQ and Virgin Money brands.

Temenos gains new core banking tech live sites in Australia

Work has now commenced on the migration of BOQ’s Members Equity Bank (ME Bank) brand to the new cloud platform. It has already been running Temenos’ core software plus a number of auxiliary applications for nearly a decade.

The latest go-live is part of BOQ’s multi-year transformation. Eventually, all retail and business banking operations and lending across the three banking brands – BOQ, Virgin Money and ME Bank – will transition to Temenos’ systems, thus simplifying and consolidating the technology landscape.

“Using Temenos’ cloud-based platform enables BOQ to offer superior customer propositions with personalised offerings at a fraction of the cost of its legacy systems, building a competitive advantage and a low cost-income ratio,” the vendor says.

BOQ has already completed over four million transactions on the new platform.

It is understood among the bank’s legacy tech are Fiserv’s Signature core banking system (retail) and Nucleus Software’s FinnOne (lending).

“We are modernising our technology from back to front to give us the flexibility and agility of a neobank, while leveraging the scalability and long-term investment of an established institution with 148 years in banking,” comments Rod Finch, chief product and transformation officer at BOQ.

Virgin Money Australia joined the BOQ family in 2013 via a $40 million acquisition deal. Under the deal, BOQ has rights to the Virgin Money name in Australia for four decades while paying royalties to the Virgin Group, and Virgin has a seat on the BOQ board. Virgin Money offers a broad range of consumer banking products via digital channels and has around 150,000 customers.

ME Bank was acquired in 2021 for $1.3 billion, and nearly doubled BOQ’s retail banking business.