EXCLUSIVE: “Setting The Imagination Free” – Temenos in ‘The Fintech Magazine’

A year on from a landmark Temenos conference, where the core banking giant rewrote its strategy, delegates were in Denmark to discover how the next chapter is unfolding

Wonderful, wonderful Copenhagen – the city where alternative realities come to life. Where more people cycle than drive. Where anarchists and capitalists co-exist. Where the world’s cleanest waste-to-energy plant has a ski slope on its roof. Here, the Danish prove what can happen when you dare to dream the seemingly implausible and make change intentional.

“We believe the future is conversational, and it’s now time to move from concept to execution “

Barb Morgan, Chief Product and Technology Officer, Temenos

And that’s exactly what delegates at the annual Temenos Community Forum, held at the city’s Bella Center in May, were encouraged to do over two days in the context of AI-embedded banking. A peripatetic event that tours the countries that the technology company serves, this year’s TCF was both a moment of reflection and a call to arms. Or, as Barb Morgan, Chief Product and Technology Officer, put it: “Do you as a community settle for incremental progress, or do you make a step change?”

Twelve months previously, in Madrid, as one of a newly appointed C-suite, Morgan had pledged to ‘build less but smarter’ by focussing on those things that ‘made the dial creep’ for customers. Three hundred plus go-lives, 23 major awards, 10 customer/partner cobuilds, and 22 new products later, it was time for the community to hold Temenos to account.

“The last real push for banks to modernise was digital, and they relied on a lot of shadow balances and middleware to get them through. They will not be ready for conversational consumer AI”

Will Moroney, Chief Revenue Officer, Temenos

The company had distilled its somewhat intangible mission of ‘Leading Banking Forward’ into a very specific playbook, ‘Trust. Modernise. Transcend’ and it lifted the lid on the underlying technology to explain exactly how it was delivering the kind of progressive modernisation that moved the industry on from big-bang core transformation – with less drama, cost and risk.

Agentic AI is now being built into every tool its clients use as standard. Not as another layer to integrate and manage, but embedded across Temenos Core and Digital Banking products. A production belt of AI co-pilots that allow users to engage directly with the system using natural language, will also soon be carrying conversational assistants for financial crime management, payments and wealth into the community.

The ultimate goal? Conversational interfaces for both staff who are building and operating systems and for customers  interacting with them at the front end.

“We believe the future is conversational, and it’s now time to move from concept to execution,” said Morgan.

Driven by the technology that has reached mass adoption faster than the personal computer, the internet, or indeed anyone had predicted, Temenos now has a plan to ‘move the dial’ with AI for every size business, whatever the architecture – be it on prem, Cloud, SaaS, or hybrid. And it’s based on a single premise: what happens if the layers of your banking stack can think?

“Heard at TCF ‘26: Composability is now the standard”

Pablo Padin, Partner – Core Banking & Payment Center of Competence at IBM Consulting

The concept of Temenos’ intelligent core is built on three component parts: Knowledge Graph, the ‘brain’ that holds the memory of every Temenos core banking implementation, allowing AI to search, analyse and query information across hundreds of use cases; Model Context Protocol, the open standard that acts like a universal USB-C for AI, running across the platform and whatever architecture a client is using, acting as the nervous system that connects into external systems and products; Conversational Interface, which enables the fundamental shift from traditional navigation to a more intuitive, faster interaction. And all of this is underpinned by an AI Framework that promises auditable, explainable decisions.

Outside the main conference hall, three huge Temenos-branded cubes were waiting to reveal what this all looked like in the flesh, from the back office where staff could spin up new products in minutes using natural language processing, to the home where customers talked to their bank, and the TemenBank Café, a reimagined branch with barista vibes, demonstrating how staff and customers could be interacting with the technology before the end of the decade.

Heard at TCF ‘26: The AI factory is the HR 2 Department for you agentic employees”

Dr. Jochen Papenbrock, EMEA Head of Financial Technology at Nvidia

Inspiring confidence

Global corporate investment in AI more than doubled in 2025. Organisational adoption rose to 88 per cent. But, as Stanford University’s 2026 Artificial Intelligence Index Report pointed out, the issue now is whether the systems built around it can keep up. That’s what Temenos and its co-development partners have been addressing over the past year, ensuring that modernisation doesn’t compromise trust or sacrifice stability, so banks have confidence to move forward in an era where the future is being constantly reinvented by artificial intelligence.

The challenge is how to reconcile that with the immutable character of their core.

“Clients want every single business function to be exposed as APIs, easy to configure with low/no code extensions and secure by design,” observed Nanda Badrappan, Deputy Chief Technology Officer at Temenos. “They want them to be inherently upgradeable and scalable with a strong innovation road map and strong ecosystem, but without losing control of their architecture.”

Composable solutions, such as those launched at the event for retail deposits and retail lending, answer the demand for flexibility, giving banks the option to upgrade one capability at a time without disruption.

Heard at TCF ‘26: Get it right and my granddaughter will be using your services in 10 years time. Get it wrong and you will not have any services in 10 years’ time “

Brian Hayes, FSI GTM Leader for EMEA at AWS

“Composability is now the standard,” said Pablo Padin, Partner – Core Banking & Payment Center of Competence IBM Consulting, adding, “In fact, composability makes agentic banking happen.”

And it’s persuading large-scale enterprises to answer the call for progressive modernisation, said Will Moroney, Temenos Chief Growth Officer, because many had ‘fallen into the trap of legacy systems and don’t want to end up there again’.

“Heard at TCF ‘26: Decision-making speed is critical. If you wait for the perfect time for implementation, you have missed the moment – and banks are not comfortable with that”

David Furlong, Chief Operating Officer at Questbank

“It’s not just legacy debt that they have to overcome; it’s legacy process. These sorts of discussions need an awful lot of trust. He was now seeing ‘a shift in momentum’.

“Our core market of Tier 3, 4 and 5 banks are on digital platforms already. In the last 18 months, we’ve seen Tiers 1 and 2 start to join them,” said Moroney. “The last real push for banks to modernise was digital, and they relied on a lot of shadow balances and middleware to get them through. They will not be ready for conversational consumer AI, and it’s driving a lot more discussion with T1 and T2 banks in the US, Europe and Asia.

“Banks that are on older legacy tech are spending 60-70 per cent of their budget just keeping the lights on. So, some are very specific about what they want AI to improve. Others are more inquisitive – ‘what are our peers doing, what are you seeing?’.”

There had been another significant change, he said: the technology choices being made today were increasingly driven by business teams wanting specific outcomes, rather than the CIO’s office looking across the tech estate. From that was emerging the concept of banking technology as a utility, which was certainly changing the conversation between providers and clients.

“The sales cycle will become a little more complex,” acknowledged Moroney.

Temenos is trying to get ahead of that curve by leveraging the trust it’s built with the industry over decades and bringing customers on board as co-developers. Among banks on the programme so far, Banque Internationale à Luxembourg worked on the co-pilot for core banking, while a leading wealth bank partnered over the financial crime management agent, for which Temenos will be client zero this year.

“Real usable innovation happens when we build together – banks, partners and Temenos,” said Morgan.

The AI crossroads

Opening the conference, Takis Spiliopoulos, who stepped up as CEO after the sudden departure of Jean-Pierre Brulard in September after only 16 months in the job, had told delegates: “We are at a defining moment in the industry. There’s a shift in momentum by AI, and the questions we ask have changed.”

The number of attendees in Copenhagen – 100 more than last year, at 1,300 in the hall and a further 500 online – suggested that, whatever had happened in the boardroom, hadn’t shaken confidence on the ground. And the conference had clearly enthused many of them. By the second day, 72 companies had signed up to the Design Partner Programme.

At the TCF dinner at the Øksnehallen in the historic Meatpacking District, those same delegates found themselves in another world. Canapes delicately suspended from ghostly trees. Dancers and acrobats bringing fairytales to life. Exquisitely decorated tables inviting guests to take part in a Nightingale’s Feast.

Inspired by the extraordinary mind of the city’s famous fabulist, Hans Christian Andersen, it seemed at first to have very little to do with banking. Then the penny dropped. We have only ever been constrained by our imagination. And what Temenos was offering were the tools to think a long, long way outside the box.

Leading Banking Forward

Several large-scale deployments of core banking modernisation and AI adoption were recognised among this year’s Temenos Forward Awards, showing just how quickly transformation projects are moving from strategy decks into production.

Future-Ready Banking Award – UBS

UBS is expanding AI adoption across the group, including exploring agentic AI use cases to improve client experience and employee productivity.

Core Banking Modernisation Award – VPBank

Vietnam’s VPBank completed a major core banking modernisation involving 18 million customer accounts and 77 tb of data in a single cutover window of under 24 hours — without disrupting customer service.

Digital Transformation Award – APC Bank

APC Bank has launched Curaçao’s first fully digital bank using a SaaS banking model designed around mobile-first onboarding and real-time account access.

Banking Innovation Award – National Bank of Kuwait (NBK)

NBK Egypt reduced loan turnaround times by more than 90 per cent through automated lending workflows.

This article was published in The Fintech Magazine Issue #38, Page 46-48