EXCLUSIVE: “Setting The Pace” – Barb Morgan, Temenos in ‘The Fintech Magazine’

Barb Morgan joined Temenos in late 2024 during a period of rapid change for the company. She hasn’t stopped since

The first thing I noticed about Barb Morgan at this year’s Temenos Community Forum (TCF)  was her footwear. After 20 months as Chief Product and Technology Officer, during which she’s sprinted between continents and through a mammoth amount of change, she’d swapped last year’s conference heels for tech sneakers.

The gleaming white kicks say something about the speed at which she works, because if there’s one thing colleagues and friends will tell you, it’s that Morgan never stops. In Copenhagen’s Bella Center, Barb could be seen accelerating up and down the stairs between banking clients, technology partners and press interviews, reaching for her phone to time departure for the next. It’s no surprise that she’s a fan of agile methodologies.

It suits both her character and her belief in collaborative, focussed, time-stamped processes if you want to get things done. In previous roles and now at Temenos she has led the move to agile software practices.

At Temenos, they’ve been crucial over the past few months in delivering on the pledge she made in Madrid that the company would build less but build better, be clear about release dates, and not promise more than it could deliver. Each team now has a very specific vision and owns the outcome.

“I’ve learned that not everyone wants to run as fast!”

Before, she says, there was a tendency for mission creep, pivoting and chasing other goals. Ultimately, customers weren’t being served. The improved internal focus was, she believes, what helped earn one of the best bits of feedback at this year’s event from a Tier 1 institution: “You listened.”

People first

Morgan might be impatient for change, but listening is something she makes time for. Outside of whichever insanely busy division of FS she’s worked for in the past 30 years, there’s always been a commitment to a cause that she believes deserves attention, be it education, young people or health. While many of Morgan’s cohort who left University of Central Oklahoma with a BSc in computer science no doubt became successful technologists, it’s that commitment to people as much as the tech, combined with an understanding of business, that’s led her to where she is.

The vision she’s chasing now is the same one she expressed more than 10 years ago when she talked of ‘looking not just at the future, but what’s in front of the future and dreaming of the impossible’. Taking on the role with Temenos meant a major life change. She relocated with her family to Dubai, to be within reach of the company’s Innovation Centre in India, but also for good connections to Temenos’ Swiss headquarters, London and the US.

She regularly takes the opportunity to spend time at the hubs in Chennai, Bangalore, Hyderabad and Orlando.

“The highs are any time I get to interact with my teams on the ground like this,” she says. “Co-design is so cool when we’rein these rooms together, and you can’t tell – it no longer matters – who is from which company.”

She’s particularly proud of the latest Temenos Innovation Hub in Florida.

“I consider it close to my heart” Morgan says. “I woke up in March and decided we should open an innovation hub in the US, and we did on June 1. Dozens of companies have come through already.”

Her lows have been the inevitable staff changes in a big organisation.

“When people leave or new people join, it stops the momentum, no matter how capable they are,” she says. And what about the learnings? Morgan smiles.

“I’ve learned that not everyone wants to run as fast, but speed with control is the key’

This article was published in The Fintech Magazine Issue #38, Page 58