Everyone’s banking platform will be composable

Temenos Community Forum 2022 was held in London last week and welcomed more than 1,500 attendees. This is down from previous highs, but still impressive considering the status of Covid in some parts of the world.

Temenos Community Forum 2022 was held at the ExCel in London

The show was opened by Temenos CMO Martin Haring, one of the many new faces of the much-changed management team at the company. Haring unveiled the company’s modern new branding, and in an instant out went the globe logo that has represented the company for a couple of decades.

Haring says: “For a CMO, nothing is more exciting than a rebrand exercise, but this one is way more than changing the colour or the visual appearance. It is the core of Temenos’ vision, mission and strategy.”

Part of the new branding is a new strapline – ‘Everyone’s Banking Platform’ – about which he says: “Becoming everyone’s banking platform is a bold vision. But being bold has been in our DNA since day one.”

CEO Max Chuard then came on to the stage to highlight the shifting customer expectations in the banking industry, saying: “Customers are used to easy, convenient and personalised experiences from global platforms like Netflix or Amazon. And now this is what they expect from banking, too.”

He says that disruption will create a $3.5 trillion revenue stream with as much as 20% of this going to new players leveraging embedded finance.

Another topic of discussion was the go-live of Temenos’ core banking system at its US customer, Commerce Bank. This will no doubt be key to the company trying to address the US market coupled with new hires Erich Gerber (CRO) and Roman Bartik (President Americas) – both previously having worked together at Tibco.

Aside from Commerce Bank, PayPal is also using the Temenos platform to power the onboarding for its buy now, pay later (BNPL) product and Green Dot has selected the firm for its banking-as-a-service play.

Outside of the USA, Flowe, an Italian neobank, was announced as having gone live on the Temenos platform in just five months.

From a product perspective, the move towards cloud native/agnostic was discussed by CTO Tony Coleman, who highlighted significant performance improvements in the platform, taking it to 102,875 transactions per second (TPS) – deeply impressive when you consider that Visa performs at 1,700 TPS and Mastercard at 5,000 TPS.

I spoke to Tony afterwards about the migration to a modern architecture, and he says: “We have used microservices and serverless architecture appropriately. Not everything has to be a microservice.”

Prema Varadhan, chief product and technology officer, described the firm’s core theme of composable banking, which is consistent with competitors in the modern core banking space.

Mambu was the first to use the composable banking story, while Thought Machine has majored on programmable products. The goal for them all is the same – to enable banks to provide hyper-personalised products and services to their customers.

Both Varadhan and Kanika Hope (chief strategy officer) reiterated the need for hyper personalisation, yet it was the latter’s reveal of CEO Navigator that was the hidden star of the show.

CEO Navigator is a consulting service backed by data from over 100 banks covering more than 50,000 data points. Hope says: “Temenos CEO Navigator is an industry-leading customer advisory service that distils Temenos’ almost 30 years of banking IP into powerful business insights for our clients.”

The service analyses operational and financial metrics as well as qualitative best practices across the entire banking value chain irrespective of what banking platform they are on. It can help bank CEO’s identify key areas for improvement and how they are performing against other banks.