EXCLUSIVE: “Feeling The Difference” – Temenos in ‘The Fintech Magazine’

The Temenos Community Forum 2025 in Madrid left its members with a challenge, as the banking technology giant moves into a new phase

African wisdom says it takes a village to rear a child. To invest a sense of right and wrong, make sure it’s not corrupted by greed or power, and respect the people who brought it into being. That shouldn’t just be the responsibility of its parents, right? So, what sort of community do we need to raise humanity’s most challenging offspring: genAI?

The co-parenting/co-design of technology was a recurring theme at the annual Temenos Community Forum (TCF), which was hosted this year in Madrid. A unique gathering of employees, customers and technology partners, the Forum is intended to imbue a sense of shared vision in the future of financial services and translate that into actionable co-operation across the Temenos supply chain.

This year, the executive team leading the event were all new to the Temenos family, and it was clear that following a rough 2024 for the global technology company, things had changed. New boss, CEO Jean-Pierre Brulard, was back from a 145,000-mile round trip from Temenos HQ, talking to clients about their operational challenges, investment priorities, and experience of Temenos’ service delivery. The whole C-suite were in listening mode.

Barb Morgan, seven months into her job as Chief Product and Technology Officer, told the conference: “Feedback has been direct and sometimes tough, but it’s appreciated.” She went on to reveal that under its mission statement for 2025, ‘Leading Banking Forward’, Temenos would be building less but smarter, with ‘focus on what really makes the dial creep’.

Senior leadership at the conference were keen to commit to more strategic product development with design thinking at its heart and with clear delivery timelines.

“When we announce products, it’s going to mean one of three things,” said Morgan. “It’s live and ready to use; it’s in private review with customers; or it’s being actively co-developed with customers and we will guarantee general availability within six months.” Chief Revenue Officer, Will Moroney spoke of a ‘huge organisational and mindset shift’ and observed that three of the top new senior appointments had begun their careers in service delivery, signalling a stronger focus
on the client experience.

As part of that, he said, Temenos was introducing a new Delivery Partner Certification Programme and setting up an offshore delivery centre that would proactively monitor projects and identify issues before they became a problem, indicating stronger performance monitoring and accountability. From now on, he added, the 8,000 staff working for partner organisations would be seen as Temenos colleagues. So, what does that all mean in practice for customers of one of the world’s oldest and biggest financial technology providers, running core banking solutions – both on prem and as a software-as-a-service model – for 950 banks worldwide?

“You told us that the Temenos Community Forum feels different. And it is”

Isabelle Guis, CMO

A raft of product and client announcements at the event included the general release in Q4 this year of a Microsoft Teams-based genAI Product Manager Co-Pilot that had originally been brought in to work alongside Temenos and its partner design teams.

An agentic AI studio would also be pre-loaded with banking models, with training and support provided so banks could build for themselves. But there was also an invitation to join a new Temenos Design Partner Programme (DPP), which signalled a fundamental change to product delivery. Already tested with three client banks, one of the first solutions to emerge from the programme is a Financial Crime Management AI agent, now successfully running at a European Tier 1 institution. As of last month, it’s generally available to Temenos customers. Within 24 hours of attendees at the conference being invited to join the Design Partner Programme, 140 had signed up.

The shift from building for customers to building with them was clearly resonating. And nowhere was that collective approach to problem-solving more important than in the development of genAI, noted Temenos’ new Chief Marketing Officer, Isabelle Guis: “Many of you have said that TCF feels different and it is. As a company, as a community and as an industry, things are changing.”

Guis presented the results of a survey conducted among 400-plus banking leaders worldwide, which revealed their top three priorities to be customer experience, product launches, and operational efficiency. No surprise there. But the intelligence around genAI adoption was more insightful. While only 11 per cent of banks had implemented the technology, 43 per cent said they were in the process of doing so. In many cases – and in the absence of a genAI officer – the bank’s leadership team was closely involved in the project. It was a sign, she said, that governance and risk associated with introducing the technology were top of mind for financial institutions, given the lack of a regulatory roadmap to follow in many jurisdictions.

Their prudence made banks ‘the heroes of the story’, said Guis

“When it comes to regulation, it’s still a patchwork,” she said. “Laws are still developing and they still lack teeth and it’s slowing down innovation. That’s what we hope to facilitate here. Derisking an AI project is bigger than any one institution.” José Manuel de la Chica, Santander’s Head of Generative AI and a member of TCF, emphasised that ‘responsible AI must be global… governance is critical’.

“We’ve come from a paradigm of processes to agents that make decisions; moved from a deterministic to a probabilistic world. That’s why there has to be a human in the loop, a human in control. This isn’t about synthetic coding. It’s about how we change the use. The agent is the new API. That needs to be the centre of our strategy.”

Guest speaker, Dr Jonnie Penn, Associate Teaching Professor of AI Ethics and Society at the University of Cambridge, said in this new world, fortune would favour collaborators. “You have to kind of work together in the same way that, in a laboratory, you and other scientists would work together to try to figure out the answer. But if you can do that and find value and also trust, you are very well positioned to succeed.”

TECH AND TAPAS

Being a newbie at the annual Temenos Community Forum can be an overwhelming experience – like meeting ALL your new partner’s relations at one massive family event. And if it was deliberately trying to impress, it succeeded.

Madrid, where extraordinary tapas and world-leading banking technology competed for attention over the three days of the Forum, was a worthy host city. As the Valdubon Roble flowed during dinner under the vaulting ceiling of the magnificent Castillo de Viñuelas, a Baroque estate on the outskirts of Madrid, I was reminded of Temenos founder, the larger-than-life Greek entrepreneur George Koukis, who died last year.

A man whose vision was to build more than a company, but a community, he once told this magazine: “Profitability is the consequence of happy clients. You need a system that does more things than that client dreamed of, and you need good services.”

Temenos today appears to be working hard to honour his legacy.

This article was published in The Fintech Magazine Issue #35, Page 22-23