Mark Gunning, Director of Business Solutions Group at Temenos, takes a look back at the past year of the integrated software solutions company and makes some predictions about the coming year.
2019 in review:
Temenos Infinity / Temenos T24 Transact. Our first major milestone of the year was the launch of two new products, Temenos Infinity and Temenos T24 Transact. This marked a major upgrade to the main stack of software that we offer banks, allowing our clients to deploy separate solutions for the front and back office.
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It also signified a major shift towards the cloud, allowing us to offer banks the best possible cloud deployment for our product. The crucial feature? Becoming cloud-native and cloud-agnostic.
Being cloud-agnostic means giving our customers the freedom to deploy on any major public cloud of their choice: Microsoft Azure, AWS Cloud or Google Cloud Platform (GCP) currently.
This is a key Temenos strategy and an answer to regulatory concerns over single vendor dependence, particularly given our ability to deploy simultaneously across more than one cloud by taking advantage of distributed database technology.
Being cloud-native means that we invest in exploiting each platform properly – leveraging the power and capabilities of each cloud platform and making use of their managed services wherever possible.
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By GlobalDataKony Acquisition
The acquisition of Kony, the US #1 digital banking SaaS company, has played a key role in accelerating our US presence and accelerating our Temenos Infinity strategy.
The acquisition of Kony enables us to provide banks with compelling out-of-the-box digital applications, supported by a great low-code and no-code, extensible environment. Through our platform, banks can take our models and quickly build a beautiful user experience for their customers, fully tailored to their brand.
Joining forces with Kony has not only been transformative in terms of advancing our technology but, with 1,500 very talented and experienced people joining our family, it has also allowed us to expand our digital culture as a company.
Explainable AI / Logical Glue Acquisition
Temenos has been building AI into its software for many years but with the acquisition of Logical Glue, a London-based provider of a patented award-winning Explainable AI (XAI), we are accelerating Temenos’ AI roadmap by bringing together a patented, proven, industry-first XAI platform.
Temenos will have XAI embedded across its banking platform. Our technology allows banks to be transparent to their client and regulators by being able to explain in simple human language how their models work and how they have reached their automated decisions.
This means that banks can make faster, more accurate, fair and explainable decisions driven by AI algorithms. Our job is to take this powerful, but essentially complicated, capability and package it into easily deployable options for banks using our software.
Temenos Value Benchmark Program
In 2019 we launched the results of the Temenos Value Benchmark Program – a strategic survey-based program providing in-depth analysis of how software capabilities impact a bank’s profitability.
The results of the program have been very exicting, demonstrating that Temenos software enables its top-performing clients to achieve industry-leading cost-income ratios of 25.2% and returns on equity of 25.0%, 2X better than the industry average. These clients which invest in end-to-end digital transformation derive tangible value to their business from their IT investment.
2020 Forecast:
In 2020, we expect to see an accelerated take-up of SaaS, with the use of cloud in banking becoming the norm in most parts of our industry and in most countries. This is not only because banks are becoming more technology-aware, but also because of a cautious but significant acceptance of cloud by regulators.
From our conversations, banks are no longer asking if we run on the cloud but how we run on the cloud. We consider that a sign of maturity as banks now understand that cloud is the future.
We will also see a greater demand for AI capabilities that are embedded into financial software. Over the last 4-5 years, there has been an increased interest in deploying AI but as the market matures, many banks will want other firms to productise it instead of having the burden of attempting to understand it in depth.
In this way, banks will become more discerning when it comes to AI and more mature in their understanding of both cloud and AI technologies in general.
Customer experience
Without a doubt, digital banking channels are increasingly the main way that customers interact with banks today. We will continue to see banking optimised for digital experiences in 2020 and beyond.
However, it’s important for banks to focus on recovering the intimacy in their customer relationships. Technology can sometimes lead to disintermediation, but with new customer-centric technologies like Temenos Infinity and Explainable AI (XAI), they can regain this intimacy.
Driven by a desire to offer differentiated experiences to their customers, we are currently seeing the approach to technology adoption in banking evolve. Banks are no longer just adopting technology that is fit for today’s demands and customer needs, but are looking to more flexible solutions that can easily adapt to support them and their customers in the future.
Regulation and the cloud
Regulators are becoming more accepting and understanding of the cloud, but there is growing concern about the risk of banks needing to close their doors should their cloud fail.
The effect of this would not only be detrimental to the bank itself but, with so many banks relying on the same small pool of cloud providers, it also creates systemic risk that could pose a threat to an economy.
We recently invested in technology from NuoDB, the next generation of database. Crucially, this offers banks the ability to run their software on two different clouds at the same time, from two different cloud providers.
This not only has advantages in terms of scalability, but very importantly, it offers some very practical disaster recovery capabilities.
If one cloud goes down and becomes unavailable, banks can carry on seamlessly on another.
