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3x Faster Implementations With the Temenos Integration Framework

The Integration Framework enables Commercial Bank of Africa to launch M-Shwari in under 5 months

Press Releases,
Temenos – Company

GENEVA, Switzerland – 4 July 2013 – Temenos (SIX: TEMN), the market leading provider of mission critical solutions to the financial services industry, today announces the general availability of its Integration Framework.

The Integration Framework, which removes the cost and complexity of integrating multiple applications within a single hub, was used by Commercial Bank of Africa (CBA) to launch M-Shwari, one of the most successful new banking ventures in Africa in recent years.

The Temenos Integration Framework: Tangible Business Value on Multiple Fronts

The Temenos Integration Framework offers banks a choice. A bank can assemble a complete model banking solution with best-of-breed components. Or, it can assemble a system using its own components – either because it already has them or because it prefers them. Or, it can assemble a system using a mix of both its own and third-party components.

It is the first time that this strategically important choice is truly viable for banks, because the Temenos Integration Framework not only offers pre-integration of best-of-breed vendor components but also makes it easy to perform the integration of any system – whether third-party or in-house – on one single hub, without any code, rapidly and cost-efficiently.

The Temenos Integration Framework creates significant business value for banks on multiple fronts. It has been shown to reduce implementation times threefold, allowing banks to go to market much faster, protecting their first-mover advantages, improving time-to-money and boosting returns-on-investment.

In terms of operational agility, by ensuring that multiple complex systems work together in perfect harmony, the Integration Framework enables banks to speedily deliver innovative, disruptive financial products to address demanding customers and intense competition. Finally, having a central integration hub at the heart of the framework means that transactional messages going between the various systems can be treated in an extremely efficient manner, centrally and asynchronously, preserving the system’s performance as it scales.

Locking in M-Shwari’s First-Mover Advantage Using the Temenos Integration Framework

Eager to tap the huge unrealized potential in domestic mobile banking, CBA formed a strategic partnership with Safaricom in 2012 to launch M-Shwari, a mobile phone-based virtual banking platform bringing mobile savings and loans products to 80% of Kenya’s adult population. Conscious of the high competitive intensity and relentless pace of innovation in the Kenyan financial services market, CBA was keen to set up the platform as quickly as possible in order to preserve its first-mover advantage as a disruptive innovator in this space. CBA also knew that quality of its mobile channel and paperless customer relationship would heavily depend on the seamless integration of a multitude of critical systems.

Using the Temenos Integration Framework, M-Shwari was able to set up, integrate and launch its M-Shwari mobile banking service in just 5 months, three times faster than originally planned. The integration of all the systems behind M-Shwari took only 3 weeks from the first interface requirement workshop to the delivery of the finalised interfaces in readiness for testing. On average, the time to build and deliver each one of the interfaces was only three days. The interfaces with the critical systems were ready for testing three weeks ahead of an already-aggressive baseline schedule, which left an entire month for enhanced onsite performance testing.

M-Shwari was officially launched in November 2012, much earlier than expected. Leveraging the strong scalability provided by the Integration Framework, M-Shwari attracted on average 32,000 new customers per business day during its first 100 days. It took M-Shwari only one month to attract 1 billion Kenyan shillings in deposits – a level which took traditional banks in Kenya many months or even years to reach – and 41 days to hit the 1 million customers mark, beating its initial target of reaching this number in 90 days. By April 2013, in less than half the time originally expected, over 3 million customers had been onboarded, a level identified as critical for the viability of the business.

Please visit www.temenos.com/integration-framework for a more detailed description of the Integration Framework, an overview of its numerous business and technical benefits, a case study on its use by Commercial Bank of Africa to launch M-Shwari in only 5 months, an interview with Temenos’ Chief Enterprise Architect on the subject, and access to an online demo of the intuitive drag-and-drop integration tool.

John Schlesinger, Temenos Chief Enterprise Architect, said:

Temenos continually invests in both its industry leading banking capability and also the platform it runs on, which is why banks prefer our software to their own. We aim to provide world class banking capability and integrate with world class non-banking capability from our partners, making the solution easier to install, higher performing and cheaper to run. By focusing on both the banking products and the architecture, we maximise the value we create for our customers both now and as they look to scale, grow and evolve their platforms.

Dennis Volemi, CBA’s Head of Technology, New Business Ventures:

The Temenos Integration Framework has been critical in enabling the speed and efficiency with which we have been able to roll out this innovative product and handle the unexpectedly large volume of transactions and data. M-Shwari far exceeded all the performance KPIs that we set out to achieve in the first 100 days, and continues to vastly outpace all of our original expectations.

Temenos Press Contacts

Scott Rowe

Temenos Global Public Relations

+44 20 7423 3857 [email protected]

Gabriel Goonetillake

Edelman Smithfield for Temenos

Tel: +44 7813 407710 [email protected]

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