EXCLUSIVE: “Move Fast… and Fix Things” – Barb Morgan, Temenos in ‘The Fintech Magazine’

Temenos has sharpened its focus in response to one of the biggest technology shifts of a generation. Barb Morgan explains how its helping clients through this transformation

The mindset in traditional banks is defined by caution – and for good reason. What corporate and retail customers want from a bank is trust, dependability, and safety. Those aren’t words you associate with the tech bro culture of move fast and break things.

But, as the pace of technology quickens, specifically technology powered by artificial intelligence, including agentic AI and general artificial intelligence, the so-called ‘legacy’ banks face a dilemma. They can’t risk becoming bystanders in a technology revolution that’s redefining how their customers run their lives and businesses. But, across the vast, complex and often bespoke workings of a bank, how do they identify the ‘right’ fit for AI, ensure they’re not wasting investment on technology that won’t adapt to regulatory change, and – perhaps the hardest question – how do they ‘undo’ the mindset in order to move fast … and fix things?

That’s something Barb Morgan, Chief Product and Technology Officer at core banking provider Temenos has given a lot of thought to recently. Since the company took a leadership role in creating safe spaces for banks to explore AI, she’s been talking to C-suites and teams about how they can rapidly reimagine an organisation’s human and technical resource. That includes engaging directly with those who might, understandably, be worried that they are engineering themselves out of their own jobs.

“The mindset we really want to create is around the art of the possible, and creating that psychological safely,” says Morgan.

Why does it matter to Temenos? As a leading provider over many years to banks, it’s held their hands, one-on-one, through progressive technology shifts and built a global community of clients and delivery partners who’ve also supported each other along the way. But AI is different, so fundamentally challenging to the banking world order, that, over the last couple of years, Temenos decided to not just hand-hold, but to co-develop solutions with clients, officially launching the Temenos Design Partnership Programme (DPP) at its Temenos Community Forum event in May, following successful pilots.

That signalled a major change in the company’s approach to product design, and with it comes the need to bring client organisations – from the top to the bottom – along with it. So, when Morgan presents Temenos’ latest offers to banks now, she starts from a position of inclusivity. The conversation isn’t limited to IT and compliance; rather, she addresses the AI elephant in the room, including with departments who historically are simply presented with a new solution and a manual to operate it, rather than being involved in its creation. As she says: “If the operations team are not part of the discussion, they are doubtful they are part of the future.”

That creates an unsympathetic environment for positive change, although being part of the discussion doesn’t shield staff from an uncomfortable truth, either.

“Jobs of the past will not be jobs of the future,” says Morgan. “But that doesn’t mean jobs go away. A big part of the cultural work we do is helping people see how it enhances how they work, versus replicating it. Because you can give an organisation all the tools you want, but if staff are not going to use it, if they are scared or do not understand it… demystifying AI is where organisations need to focus.”

“Our strategy is to give clients AI tools embedded within our core banking products, creating traceability and reliability that builds trust”

There is a commercial imperative to all this. According to Gartner, last year more than half of the financial services companies it surveyed had abandoned an AI product due to ‘mis-steps in estimating and calculating costs’. Key areas where these companies experienced setbacks were regulatory compliance, technological integration, and workforce adaptation. In other words, pretty much all spheres of their business. That hasn’t necessarily dampened banks’ curiosity in how AI can solve some of their challenges, but those ‘mis-steps’, combined with increasing scrutiny of AI by regulators, has made them a lot more selective in where they spend their budget.

“I don’t think the dollar will go down when it comes to investment in AI, but I do think the money that goes into it will be more intentional,” agrees Morgan. In this era of post-AI hype, being the vendor who offers structured product co-development and is prepared to invest time in making organisations implementation-ready through cultural coaching is smart if you want sticky customers, invested just as much in you as
you are in them. But what about that other stumbling block: regulation?

“There are many AI products being launched, but not all meet the expectations of financial regulators,” says Morgan. “Our strategy is to give clients AI tools embedded within our core banking products, creating traceability and reliability that builds trust. We are also aligning product development to support the ISO 42001 standard, ensuring we are building to the highest bar possible.”

That said, pushback from some authorities is inevitable as the technology develops, particularly around the use of agentic AI, both by, and interacting with, financial services.

Some see that particular development as being so transformational as to be ‘the new API’. And while multiple agent-to-agent discourse is ‘still frontier’, says Morgan, MCP (Model Context Protocol) servers, are certainly rapidly facilitating it. No two regions’ regulatory approach to that, or anything else, is likely to be the same.

“The US tends to take a more flexible, principles-based approach to AI regulation, while the EU has opted for a more prescriptive framework,” observes Morgan.

By working directly with customers in dialogue with regulators, Temenos is reinforcing its role as a trusted partner – helping banks navigate the complexities of AI adoption across jurisdictions with confidence and clarity. The Design Partnership Programme doesn’t just benefit individual banks looking for a bespoke, compliant product. The work Temenos did with a Tier 1 institution to improve financial crime management with agentic AI suited to its requirements spun out into a general product launch this summer of the Financial Crime Management AI Agent.

Seeing the potential to bring value to the wider Temenos Community by, where possible, creating more projects like this, is now a deliberate part of its product development strategy. It’s also reflected in the upcoming release of a Microsoft Teams-based genAI Product Manager Copilot that was co-developed with Design Partner banks in Europe and the US.

“Half a dozen customers have had the copilot in private preview, and it’s been fascinating to see the response,” says Morgan. “By unlocking the full innovation potential of Temenos Core using generative AI, we’re helping banks to deliver better products, faster.”

A forum for change

At the Temenos Community Forum this summer, an invitation for the audience to work closer with the company on AI development resulted in a stampede of interest.

“We have certainly seen the dial shift. We are seeing our customers go from just curious to now ‘what do I do with it? We need your help!’,” says Morgan.

“What we found when we got back to people who’d expressed an interest in the programme was that they were all at different levels of AI engagement. For those who were still just curious, we offered two hours of learning to run with their teams. That teaches the concept of design thinking and how to bring more parts of the organisation into that. But there were other clients where we could identify specific use cases, and we signed up roughly half of those to be co-design partners. We’ll now work on a
sprint with them over three months to develop the ideas.”

A prototype sprint with one banking client saw staff involved from across the organisation. It wasn’t a conventional technical development programme: spaghetti even featured at one point! But it gave teams ownership of the idea and a stake in not just the bank’s future but also their own.

And that’s the mindshift that Morgan wants to create, seeding the ground for responsible, scalable adoption of AI – by individuals and organisations, technically and culturally.

This article was published in The Fintech Magazine Issue #36, Page 44-45