Supercharge Your Business by Supercharging Your People
It’s no secret that financial institutions must become more efficient internally if they hope to succeed externally. That includes your people as well.
Before a financial institution onboards new customers, grabs market share, and shines in the public eye, it must make sure all systems are running smoothly internally. It must streamline its inner processes to become more efficient than its competitors, and technology is a deciding factor that determines who wins, who loses, and who stays stuck in the middle.
Yet apart from efficiency and technology, there is a third element that requires attention, and this element also operates best when viewed from the lens of internal modernization—your people.
People are a unique asset, and like other high-value assets, when aligned by design, they strengthen the business in measurable ways.
Freeing your staff from workflow snags, time-consuming overhead, and clerical tasks, manual back-office processing, paper shuffling, and needless redundancies frees them up to focus on the customer
Modernization lets you achieve just that.
Modernization: make it work for you and yours
Modernization can be defined as a continuous transformation of technology, operations, and business strategies, making FIs more agile, flexible, and efficient.
That’s not an easy task when customer demands, market demands, regulatory demands, and other factors remain in constant change.
All the technology in the world won’t help a bank succeed in such an environment without the right staff empowered to carry out the right tasks, even when budgets are tight, business is slow, and uncertainty is high.
Research shows staff want to add value to their customers—and employers.
A recent poll found that nearly 80% say their job satisfaction would rise if they could spend less time on non-customer-facing tasks such as paperwork.[1] Too many employees say they are spending too much time logging information in spreadsheets, re-entering the same data in disconnected systems, or dealing with workarounds for outdated software. It’s exhausting and inefficient.
In fact, 39% of branch employees indicated they prefer to eliminate all paper forms from their workflows, with the average employee spending two hours weekly on logging and administrative forms.
Why are employees bogged down in paperwork and other telltale signs of twentieth-century banking today? Legacy infrastructure and legacy thinking.
When legacy tech holds back human potential
Despite the push toward digital transformation, many FIs still rely on systems that were built decades ago. A surprising 43% of legacy banking platforms are still built on COBOL—a language developed in the late 1950s.[2] Considering that COBOL is 65 years old, the number of workforce experts skilled in managing its manual workarounds and maintenance is shrinking each year. Worse, fragmented technology environments mean bank employees often juggle multiple platforms—core banking, CRM, loan origination, payment systems—all with different logins, workflows, and data sets. They have no unified view of the customer and cannot collaborate on delivering omnichannel experiences that add value.
Empowering employees with the right tools
Winning banks see modernization as a process that not only transforms software and workflows, but how their people produce as well.
A banking platform must equip employees with everything they need to be faster, more effective, and more engaged. In short, a banking core and solutions should:
- Streamline workflows with automation– By reducing manual processes, employees get more time to serve customers and tackle strategic initiatives. Low-code/no-code tools empower teams to build or modify workflows themselves—no IT backlog required.
- Eliminate dependence on outdated systems – Staff can create and configure offerings without touching code, meaning faster launches and lower maintenance costs.
- Enhance service quality and drive customer satisfaction – Real-time data and integrated systems give staff the insights they need to respond to inquiries quickly, make personalized recommendations, and strengthen customer relationships. In fact, the right tools may increase customer satisfaction by up to 30%[3] .
- Boost talent attraction and retention – Equipping your team with intuitive, digital-first systems helps you attract younger talent and retain experienced professionals.
SaaS: empowering people who empower people
A SaaS platform adds value when it comes to optimizing use of human resources. On a SaaS platform, staff sidestep spending time, energy—and money—on hosting, security, patching, or performance monitoring. The provider handles it all. As a result, teams can give their full attention to end clients and strengthen the business.
A great fintech provider should offer a well-organized marketplace of pre-integrated partners that are easy for banks to discover and deploy—helping them expand their capabilities without adding complexity. It should deliver a suite of pre-configured, end-to-end processes that eliminate the need for manual fixes on poorly integrated systems. Finally, it should simplify product design and enable personalized pricing across the bank from a single interface, accelerating product launches and ensuring data consistency.
AI should figure in as well: it enhances staff performance by helping with complex decision-making, automating routine queries, and identifying compliance risks. For example, when evaluating a mortgage application, AI tools should not only suggest whether to approve, deny, or adjust the offer —but deliver a clear explanation as to why the recommendation was made. When backed by such tools, employees are confident, efficient, and they serve the customer better.
All this translates into less menial work, and banks know this.
A recent Temenos poll conducted by Hanover Research found that almost all banks today provide training on third-party gen AI tool usage to ensure policy compliance (98%). More widespread use of AI, it seems, doesn’t have to compromise security—another 98% of banks said they were preventing their employees from using non-reviewed third-party gen AI tools.
Modernization is a people strategy
Your staff is your greatest asset—and modern IT should help them thrive. Legacy systems do the opposite. They drain time, energy, and morale, forcing employees to work around technology instead of with it.
By removing the weight of legacy systems and giving teams tools that truly work for them, financial institutions can achieve better outcomes across the board: improved efficiency, better technology, and a workplace in which people are proud.
But when modernization is approached as a people-first strategy, the results are transformative. Empowered with intuitive tools, real-time insights, and AI that supports rather than replaces, your teams can focus on what matters most: delivering exceptional customer experiences. The institutions that win tomorrow will be those that invest in their people today—by giving them the modern foundation they need to lead, adapt, and grow.
Discover how Temenos can transform your banking solutions today.
