Credito Emiliano S.p.A

Reinforcing innovation leadership with a simple, secure, and user-friendly mobile banking app

Reggio Emilia, Italy

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At a Glance

● 9 months to develop and launch a new mobile banking app with an intuitive and frictionless user experience

● Ongoing rollout to 450,000 customers, giving them access to enhanced money management tools

● Contributes to 30% annual growth in mobile app usage, with millions of digital transactions in 2021

● 93% of total transactions run on digital channels

● 45% growth in average daily login on the mobile app

One of the ten largest banks in Italy, Credito Emiliano SpA (Credem) has been helping customers to manage their finances for more than 110 years. Headquartered in Reggio Emilia and listed on the Borsa Italiana stock exchange, the bank offers wealth management services alongside retail, business, and corporate banking. With 1.5 million customers, Credem reported total assets under management of EUR 65 billion.

Digital services are a strategic priority for Italian banks, especially since the pandemic limited access to physical branches. As the battle for market share intensifies, they strive to differentiate themselves from the competition with online and mobile services that place simple, secure, and intuitive financial tools at users’ fingertips.

“We are evolving our business model, pushing very strongly towards a full omnichannel service, with an optimal mix between human and digital to meet highest and most demanding client needs. To build long-lasting relationships with customers, with regard to digital channels, we aim to make every digital touchpoint and digital contact as frictionless and easy-to-navigate as possible.”
Fabio Caliceti, Head of Digital Channels, Credem

Fostering a culture of digital innovation

Credem has decided to speed up the group’s innovation by starting from 2019 to work on various initiatives: set up a stronger connection with the fintechs, and introduce new leading-edge technologies such as automation, artificial intelligence, and chatbots to enhance the bank’s services.

The emphasis on innovation has sparked strong growth across Credem’s digital channels—but the bank saw opportunities to improve its mobile banking app. With its previous development platform, Credem found adding new features and performing maintenance a time-consuming and labor-intensive process.

Lorenzo Villa, Head of Touchpoints, IT Department, Credem, adds: “There was a risk of our mobile app becoming outdated and falling behind the competition. Our platform vendor offered no clear technology roadmap, with limited investment in new functionality. We had significant growth in app usage, but we need to make ongoing improvements to maintain that momentum.”

Selecting a low-code development platform

Credem planned a new mobile app for retail banking, private banking, and small and medium-sized business customers called “DIgital BANKing” with a fresh design and a rich array of tools to empower users to manage their accounts. To build the new app, Credem assembled a team of developers, business analysts, and Product Owners, and decided to use Temenos Infinity on the Temenos Banking Cloud utilizing the cloud infrastructure of AWS.

“Temenos offered a very useful low-code platform that would allow our teams to develop the new mobile app in JavaScript and bring new front-end features to market rapidly. Cloud and CI/CD are two pillars of our IT strategy, so we also wanted a partner with proven service delivery capabilities, letting us the opportunity to stay focused on new functionalities delivery, and the Temenos team demonstrated considerable experience using CI/CD methodologies to test, develop, and deploy new banking apps.”
Lorenzo Villa, Head of Touchpoints, IT Department, Credem

He adds: “The Temenos Banking Cloud on AWS ensures that we avoid the hassle and costs of managing infrastructure, which has formed a key part of our IT strategy for many years. The cloud model gives us elastic scalability, allowing us to provision resources at the click of a button during testing and development.”

Developing and launching quickly—despite the pandemic

Credem started the implementation just as the pandemic struck, with lockdowns sweeping across Italy. To keep work moving forward, the project team moved to a remote deployment and development strategy, based on an agile framework. Working together, Credem and Temenos completed discovery phases, created and tested the alpha version of the new app, and launched the full version on the market in just nine months.

“Completing such a complex project fully remotely wasn’t easy at all, but Temenos helped to minimize disruption, bringing wide-ranging skills and competencies to the table, this, added to a strong commitment from Credem people has achieved the goal of completing the development and launching of the new app in nine months; a really excellent result.”
Lorenzo Villa, Head of Touchpoints, IT Department, Credem,

During the development process, Credem made full use of Temenos Country Model Bank functionality, which provides prebuilt workflows, such as payments and money transfers, that, after some evolutions defined during the project, are now fully compliant with local Italian financial regulations—helping to reduce project complexity and accelerate time-to-market.

The omnichannel low-code Temenos platform was pivotal to success, as Lorenzo Villa confirms: “With the Temenos solution, we were able to use the same code for both the iOS and Android versions of the app. We could work as a single, unified team throughout, focusing all our strengths on a single technology and not splitting on different mobile operating systems. Our users found the Temenos platform easier than other technologies, we have invested time in skilling our people, and in a short time we have been proficient with the tools.”

Delivering a superior in-app experience

Following the successful launch in January 2021, Credem is gradually rolling out the new Touchpoint app to approximately 450,000 individual and private banking customers. The new app features a simplified, frictionless design and interface that makes it easy for users to navigate the various menus and features, while multi-factor authentication, including biometrics options, ensures the highest levels of security.

Within the app, Credem customers can activate and manage cards, view transaction records, make and schedule transfers, top-up prepaid payment cards, and much more. In future releases, Credem plans to roll out additional features, including functionality for bill and tax payments—plus tailored services for small to medium businesses.

“With Temenos, we can make enhancements to our mobile app that were more complex with our older platform, ensuring that we continue to improve the user experience. The solutions enable us to develop and bring new services to market rapidly: we have already introduced smart credit card management and payments options, and recently we have added account aggregation.”
Lorenzo Villa, Head of Touchpoints, IT Department at Credem

Moving forward, Credem also intends to harness third-party integration tools leveraging the partner ecosystem Temenos Exchange, to further enhance its mobile banking services, as Lorenzo Villa explains: “With Temenos Exchange, we can connect seamlessly to leading-edge fintech solutions, avoiding the complexity of in-house development. Temenos gives us all the tools that we need to cement our status as a leading innovator among Italian banks.”

Attracting more and more app users

Working with Temenos to develop the Touchpoint app has helped Credem to attract new users for its mobile banking services. In recent years, the bank has achieved consistent 30 percent annual growth in app usage and downloads, with 77.6 million transactions across all its digital channels in 2021.

Since the launch of the new app built on Temenos solutions, Credem has achieved approximately 450,000 customers active on the Mobile App, with an average quarterly enrollment of 20,000; actually, the 93% of total transactions run on digital channels (Mobile, Online Banking, etc.), keeping the mobile application at the core of digital evolution process.

“Temenos has been an important pillar in the ongoing growth of our mobile app. Along with the dedication of our development teams and our strong focus on innovation, the Temenos solutions have helped us to accelerate our digital transformation and evolution towards omnichannel service delivery.”
Fabio Caliceti, Head of Digital Channels, Credem

As well as adding more app features for small and medium business customers, Credem is exploring the possibility of redesigning its online banking channels using Temenos Infinity, building streamlined journeys for every stage of the customer lifecycle from onboarding and origination onwards.

Lorenzo Villa concludes: “Temenos is a great partner to Credem, always sharing useful information and looking to assist us in new ways. With Temenos, we are building innovative digital banking services that will help to strengthen our ties with our customers and differentiate ourselves in a competitive market. We are confident that we are looking at a brighter future, and Temenos will be a key part of this.”