Temenos on Tackling Legacy Barriers in Payments

At Money20/20 USA 2025, Heman Daswani, Payments Specialist at Temenos, described how financial institutions can overcome the legacy barriers slowing the industry’s most dynamic era of innovation. “We are in a golden era for payments,” he said, “but a critical mass of banks are unable to move fast enough because of the legacy technology they’re carrying.”

Daswani outlined how decades-old core systems continue to hinder transformation — from the inability to operate 24/7 payment cores to the lack of real-time fraud detection and data-driven insights. Even as instant payments and ISO 20022 formats become the norm, many institutions remain constrained by fragmented infrastructures that limit their ability to modernise.

Temenos aims to address these challenges through its Money Movement and Management Hub, a unified platform that integrates payments processing, account management, risk, and treasury operations. The design recognises that all payment organisations, whether banks or fintechs, must manage these four core pillars cohesively. By connecting them through a single architecture, Temenos enables institutions to modernise end-to-end — improving liquidity management, settlement efficiency, and real-time fraud monitoring.

Looking ahead, Daswani sees regulation playing a decisive role in how new technologies mature. With rapid disruption in areas like AI, open banking, blockchain, and stablecoins, he predicts that the coming years will bring tighter controls and frameworks to ensure responsible innovation. “Regulation will catch up,” he said. “It will define how safely and how often we can use these innovations.”

Temenos’s message is clear: in a world racing toward instant, intelligent payments, true agility starts with modern infrastructure.