Why the Future of Banking Transformation is a Team Sport
By Gergana Pozgay, Head of Partner Sales APAC, Temenos
Partnership is easy to talk about. Harder to build. At AWS’s Singapore office, we took a step toward building it.
We brought together our most strategic Global System Integrator (GSI) partners, the AWS leadership team, and Temenos executives for an evening we called the Power of Three. It wasn’t a product pitch. It wasn’t a partner briefing. It was an honest conversation about how we win together in one of the most complex, high-stakes markets in the world: core banking transformation in Asia Pacific.
Having come from cloud consulting, I’ll say this plainly: no single vendor, no matter how strong their product or how deep their cloud infrastructure, can walk into a tier one bank in Vietnam or Indonesia and deliver a core banking transformation alone. That era is over.
The Market Has Changed. So Must We.
Michael Araneta, AWS’s banking leader for ASEAN, framed the opportunity with precision. The average core banking system in ASEAN is 25 years old. That means institutions across the Philippines, Thailand, Indonesia and Vietnam are overdue for change. His point was clear: 2026 is the year of the big banks. Digital banks were the story of the last seven years. The next chapter is Tier 1 core replacement.
What’s made this possible is the shift to cloud-native architecture. Michael’s concept of “hollowing out” the core, extracting lending, deposits, and product manufacturing logic from monolithic systems, means transformation no longer requires a billion-dollar programme and five years of risk. It can be sequenced, managed, and delivered in stages. That’s a fundamentally different conversation with a bank’s board.
The market is also broader than core banking alone. Payments transformation, lending transformation, wealth management, channels: every one of these represents an entry point. The universe of opportunity is large, and it grows with every conversation we have together as a three-party team.
There are 2,500 banks that make significant decisions every year on their technology and would really be the universe of banks that we should address together.”
Michael Araneta, Financial Services Banking Leader ASEAN, AWS
What Temenos Is Building
Edgardo Torres-Caballero, our SVP of Global Partnerships, made the trip to Singapore as part of his APAC circuit, a signal of how seriously Temenos is treating the partner-led growth motion in this region. He was candid about where we’re going: a $1 billion SaaS target over the next three years, a leaner and more focused partner ecosystem, and a clear bias for execution in the field.
The point was clear: the ambition is real, and so is the acknowledgement that partners are not a nice-to-have. They are how Temenos wins.
We’ve assembled a Formula One team — and like any great team, we win together with our partners.”
Edgardo Torres-Caballero, SVP Global Partnerships, Temenos
As Head of Partner Sales APAC, that ambition is exactly what drew me to this role. My team has grown to four people since I joined, with Murray covering Australia and New Zealand, Sheetal managing eleven markets across Asia, and Enrique covering the rest. We are the connective tissue between our partners, our sales organization, and our customers.
Peter Bagge, who leads new business across Asia, brought it back to the fundamental question every bank in the region is wrestling with: how do you compete when your technology is holding you back? The answer, he argued, is not to go it alone.
That’s where the Power of Three comes in — Temenos, AWS, and our GSI partners, together making that modernisation happen.”
Peter Bagge, Vice President New Business Asia, Temenos
It is a simple idea, but it is the right one. Cloud infrastructure, a modern core banking platform, and the implementation expertise to bring it all together. Each piece matters. None of it works without the other two.
The Mechanics of Partnership
Meera Joy, AWS’s Acceleration Partner Manager for APJ, walked us through what the Power of Three actually looks like in practice, and it is more structured than most partnerships I have seen. The genesis of her role, as she explained it, speaks to a broader shift in how AWS approaches the market.
Customers are not buying a vendor or two vendors, but they’re really looking at how all of these sit on the Lego block and the partners who bring all of these together are the ones that will win.”
Meera Joy, Principal Partner Development Manager, AWS
The BOX programme, Business Outcome Xcelerator, is the starting point. It brings all three parties together around a shared demand signal, funds the feasibility study, and co-invests in bringing a joint solution to market, including third-party lead generation support once the business plan is in place. AWS puts real money behind it: funding for the solution build, validated listings exposed to sellers across the globe, and a co-sell mechanism that connects directly into AWS account teams through the APN portal.
For enterprise customers already committed to AWS spend, the Marketplace angle adds another lever. Any solution procured through Marketplace counts toward a customer’s existing AWS commit, simplifying budgeting conversations and removing friction from the sales cycle. The partners who know how to use these tools early in a deal will close faster and at a lower cost of sale.
One Team in Front of the Customer
From left: Michael Araneta, Financial Services Banking Leader ASEAN, AWS; Gergana Pozgay, Head of Partner Sales APAC, Temenos; Peter Bagge, Vice President New Business Asia, Temenos; Gayathri Venkataramanan, Head of Support APAC, Temenos.
Gayathri Venkataramanan has been with Temenos for twenty years and has seen core banking transformation from every angle. She was clear that when the three parties walk into a customer together, the goal is not to manage individual roles but to present a single, unified answer.
Temenos brings the product roadmap and best practices. AWS brings cloud architecture, migration expertise, and the confidence that comes from proven infrastructure at scale. The GSI brings delivery capability and on-the-ground knowledge to make the journey real for each individual bank.
Gayathri also highlighted something that is easy to underestimate: banks often do not know what cloud best practice looks like in a banking context. That knowledge transfer, from AWS to the GSI to the customer, is what turns a strong architecture into a successful transformation. That standard is exactly what we are working toward.
All three of us take equal roles and responsibility. We have to lean on each other, fill the gaps, so that when we go in front of the customer they look at us as one strong team.”
Gayathri Venkataramanan, Head of Support APAC, Temenos
What’s Next
Intent without execution is just a good dinner. So here is what I am focused on: moving from tactical wins to a strategic, account-by-account pursuit plan with each of our seven partners. The pre-funnel is where we win. Being in the room two years before an RFP, shaping the narrative, building the confidence through blueprints and success stories, so that by the time a bank is ready to move, the answer is already clear.
The groundwork is laid. The partnerships are intentional, the programmes are funded, and the market is ready. What we build from here, account by account, market by market, is the story I am looking forward to telling.
Gergana Pozgay leads Partner Sales across Asia Pacific at Temenos.