How Banks Can Maintain Core Stability While Driving Innovation

AT TCF 2026, Unnikrishnan Rajagopal, Global Director from IBM, highlights the transformative power of the long-standing partnership between IBM and Temenos. Rajagopal emphasises that for today’s banks, modernisation is no longer about a risky rip-and-replace approach and instead describes it as a progressive, three-dimensional journey that allows financial institutions to evolve without disruption

The strategy outlined by Rajagopal focuses on a smart, dual-architecture approach and banks are advised to keep their mission-critical core data on stable, reliable on-premises systems, while simultaneously wrapping that core with modern microservices and APIs. By using container-based technologies like Red Hat OpenShift for these surrounding workloads, banks can modernise specific functions, such as payment solutions or fraud detection, tailored to their individual business needs and maturity levels.

A major theme of the conversation is composability, and Rajagopal explains how banks can build platforms using interchangeable, plug-and-play components which model allows financial institutions to assemble, reassemble, or replace parts of their tech stack as needed. Rajagopal points out that this significantly reduces execution risk, as banks can innovate and add new functionality without the danger of bringing their entire system down.

Rajagopal stresses that the collaboration between IBM and Temenos goes beyond a simple business deal; it is a decades-old relationship that spans infrastructure, software, and consulting. By combining IBM’s powerful infrastructure platforms with Temenos’s applications, the two companies are helping banks navigate a complex landscape to achieve tangible business outcomes.