At a Glance

2.5 million customers and 6.9 million accounts successfully migrated

• Managed 2 releases a month

Shorter time-to-market to launch new products

Named again among America’s Best Banks by Forbes, Commerce Bank, top 50 US Bank, has been serving customers for over 150 years. With a long-term view and a focus on the customer, Commerce operates utilizes the “super community bank” model, which requires bringing together sophisticated banking products with high-touch, high-tech delivery to create and build deep relationships.

It means that Commerce Bank attempts to combine the back end of a large regional bank offering the products and services that you would expect with the front end of a community bank or a smaller bank with deep personal relationships, excellent customer service, bankers that are empowered to solve problems.

Like every bank, Commerce Bank was facing both external and internal challenges. Externally, it’s the explosion of digital solutions, and particularly the competition from fintechs, especially in the US facing shifting customer expectations. Internally, Commerce Bank is struggling with what is usually referred to as technical debt- managing those 30-plus-year-old systems and making the system do modern things.

Commerce Bank sought the next long-term strategic partner and a platform that shares the same vision of the future and had a common culture. The bank was seeking for a modern, integrated, extensible, highly configurable platform. And finally, the Commerce bank was considering cloud options in the long term and the economics and the flexibility would really help them drive value.

“Commerce is focused on staying at the forefront of technology to ensure the best service to our customers. We recognize that a modern core banking platform is an accelerator for innovation and digital customer experiences. The Temenos platform will enable Commerce to deliver innovative solutions for our customers today and well into the future.”

David Roller, Chief Information Officer at Commerce Bank

Commerce chose Temenos as its strategic technology partner for its highly flexible, agile banking platform. Temenos’ modern platform increases operational efficiency and enhances Commerce’s ability to innovate and incorporate emerging technologies. The Temenos U.S. model bank approach helps Commerce to meet the unique business and regulatory needs of the market in an efficient and cost-effective way. This milestone completes its modernization project to move from its legacy systems for deposits to a modern, agile and open platform tailored for the US market.

In the quarter following the implementation, customer satisfaction and customer retention scores were either maintained or improved across all Commerce’s business segments. The great collaboration of Commerce and Temenos teams has enabled the migration of 2.5 million customers and 6.9 million accounts – spread across over 360 different product types. The bank was also able to do two releases a month and is working towards doing more. With Temenos open platform for composable banking Commerce is delighted to be able to grow and scale and shorten the time to market for new products. The super community model is a long-term strategy for Commerce coupled with big picture macro trends around digital, analytics, and automation on modern cloud architectures.

To deliver differentiated digital solutions to their customers, Commerce developed an enterprise digital strategy across their consumer wealth and commercial businesses. To connect customers to bankers Commerce launched during the pandemic, Commerce Bank Connect, based on the Temenos engage platform. It is a customized solution that allows customers to connect with a banker of their choice right from their smartphone.

Commerce helps high-net-worth individuals simplify their complex financial lives and by the end of 2022, Commerce will launch a Temenos-based private banking lending solution to keep ahead of the competition. Lastly, Commerce is modernizing its payments framework based on the Temenos payments engine, they aim to be an early adopter of the Instant Payment product introduced next year by the Federal Reserve Bank.

Temenos has, as we’ve discovered the right technology, but also the US model bank has the regulatory support for us. We spent a lot of time with you working on it, and we believe it’s ready. But I’d also say that you have the people to deliver. So yes, we would recommend it.

David Roller, Chief Information Officer at Commerce Bank