Temenos rolls out its Financial Crime Mitigation tool on Microsoft Azure

Written by Ruby Hinchliffe
30th April 2020

Temenos, the Swiss firm providing more than 3,000 banks with banking software, has teamed up with long-term partner, Microsoft, to open access to one of its artificial intelligence (AI)-driven solutions to help banks tackle the coronavirus-induced surge in cybercrime.

The surge has seen fraudsters exploiting the current economic uncertainty and capitalising on the need for pandemic equipment. These emerging cybersecurity threats can lead to a rise in anti-money laundering (AML), terrorist financing (TF), and loan application fraud.

Temenos’ product director for financial crime, treasury and risk Adam Gable

This is why Temenos is allowing its ‘Financial Crime Mitigation’ (FCM) Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solution to be set up on Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform and deployed “within weeks”. FCM offers up-to-date sanction screening, AML, know your customer (KYC) and fraud management protection, which is then combined with AI-driven transaction monitoring and sanction screening.

Until the end of June, Temenos is offering banks a free “vanilla system with test data” for the first 14 days. After that, banks can decide whether to proceed with an annual subscription to the software, which would then see the bank’s risk appetite and specific regulatory requirements implemented.

“The cloud is a big investment for us, as we believe it’s the future,” Temenos’ product director for financial crime, treasury and risk Adam Gable tells FinTech Futures.

Temenos’ history with Microsoft dates back to 2011, when it deployed one of the first cloud core banking systems years before cloud-based challengers emerged.

Gable says there are two facets to Temenos’ launch of FCM on Azure. Firstly, that the current crisis has emphasised the need for technology like FCM, particularly for those firms who were “a little bit behind”, such as Westpac’s AUD 1.14 billion pre-coronavirus AML breach, which he highlights as an example of how “banks are still catching up”.

Secondly, the launch is designed to help banks tackle current, emerging threats which Gable says are generally a variation on existing threats.

Temenos says FCM, which is already used by 200 banks, delivers false positive rates under 2% versus the claimed 7% industry standard. Gable points out that many banks have false positives far higher than 7%.