Banking Tech Awards 2021 Winner: Temenos – Best Core Banking Solution Provider
Prema Varadhan shows how Temenos open platform for composable banking is accelerating product time-to-market for banks and non-banks.
Prema Varadhan: “Temenos Banking Cloud a game-changer for banks that can no longer wait to modernise their technology infrastructure”
The speed and cost of innovation and the emergence of new business models such as Banking-as-a-Service (BaaS) are changing the DNA of how banks operate and collaborate.
According to Prema Varadhan, Chief Product and Technology Officer at Temenos, banks running on complex legacy-based IT systems are not equipped for this change.
“Although banks have been investing heavily in digital and cloud technologies in recent years, they have been reluctant to embark on core system modernisation.”
Varadhan believes the tipping point has been reached. “The good news is that transformations can now be managed easily and with acceptable levels of risk because of new cloud and SaaS banking platforms, built on API-first, microservices and DevOps principles offering automated migration and deployment.”
And that is why Varadhan is so excited about the Temenos Banking Cloud. “Temenos has advanced its technology architecture and banking capabilities to deliver the most open and secure cloud-native platform for composing, extending, or deploying banking capabilities,” she says.
Composable banking services and capabilities
On the Temenos Banking Cloud, pre-composed banking services can be consumed from a self-service portal, easily configured, extended, or deployed anywhere. “It’s a game-changer for banks that can no longer wait to modernise their technology infrastructure.”
Varadhan explains: “Composed Temenos Banking Services consist of pre-configured and pre-assembled Temenos banking capabilities plus optional integrated third-party solutions from the Temenos Exchange.
“This helps banks and non-banks to bring differentiated banking experiences to market faster and meet growing customer expectations while reducing the cost of development.”
Varadhan’s team is committed to delivering a broad portfolio of Temenos Banking Services to meet the needs of banks of all sizes across retail, corporate, SME and wealth segments.
“We recently announced the industry’s first AI-driven Buy Now Pay Later (BNPL) Banking Service and new Temenos Banking Services designed specifically to meet the unique requirements of challenger banks,” says Varadhan.
Other Temenos Banking Services include Retail Lending, Payment, Fraud Mitigation, KYC Customer Risk Assessment, and soon Digital Mortgages and Demand Deposit Accounts.
Larger banks can choose individual Temenos Banking Capabilities such as Lending, Deposits, Accounts, or Virtual Accounts and quickly integrate them independently in their system landscape.
Flexibility, agility, and extensibility
Temenos aims to create a vibrant partner ecosystem for collaboration and innovation on its platform through Temenos Exchange, its enhanced marketplace for fintech solution providers.
In addition, Temenos’ new extensibility framework enables banks or BaaS providers like Vodeno, Green Dot, and Mbanq to explore additional banking services and capabilities and configure or even extend their functionality.
“Temenos’ partners can make use of this feature to write country-specific extensions to Temenos Banking Services without touching their core functionality,” explains Varadhan.
“To compete effectively, banks need to become more agile to deliver applications at high velocity and accelerate product time-to-market. Based on DevOps, the Temenos platform allows for continuous integration and delivery, fast testing, removing the need for major upgrades, and always leveraging the latest services features.”
The platform also uniquely includes Explainable AI. This means banks can quickly deploy new capabilities to better test, report, and measure product performance and gain insights to support smarter business decisions as well as hyper-personalised banking.
“Explainable AI brings transparency into these decisions, helping banks explain in plain language to customers and regulators how AI-based decisions are made,” says Varadhan.
Customer success
A notable example of the Temenos Banking Cloud in practice is Banca Mediolanum Group’s digital bank, Flowe – an environmentally friendly Italian challenger bank geared toward younger retail banking customers who desire ethical and innovative digital banking.
Flowe went live in a record time of just five months, onboarding 15,000 customers in its first week. In the first six months, Flowe attracted more than 600,000 customers.
Supported by Temenos Banking Cloud, Flowe can now grow sustainably, passing on benefits to customers for a cleaner, greener planet and a better society.
Using the API capabilities allows Flowe to cut down deployment time and costs and easily connect to third parties, such as Doconomy, which calculates the carbon footprint created by each customer’s transactions.
Flowe harnesses Temenos Financial Crime Mitigation to maintain security during customer onboarding and transactions processing. To provide a wide array of electronic money transfer services, Flowe relies on Temenos Payments.
Along with supporting card transactions and direct debit transfers, Flowe uses the platform to facilitate specific payments to education and administrative authorities in Italy.
Another innovative bank using Temenos cloud technology is Varo Bank. It estimates that it serves customers at 25% of the total costs incurred by a traditional bank. For its journey from fintech to a bank and its use of technology to provide low-cost, innovative digital banking services aimed at the 180 million Americans currently underserved by the traditional system, Varo was awarded the Celent Model Bank of the Year 2021.
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