CBA Wins Industry Award Using Temenos Integration Framework

Press Releases, April 8, 2014

Temenos – Company

GENEVA, Switzerland – 8 April 2014 – Temenos (SIX: TEMN), the market-leading provider of mission-critical solutions to the financial services industry, today announces that the Commercial Bank of Africa’s (CBA) use of the Temenos Integration Framework has won Celent’s Model Bank of the Year Award – the highest accolade of the recent Celent ‘Innovation & Insight Day’ in New York.

The award recognises CBA’s M-Shwari product – a mobile phone-based virtual banking platform, which utilises the Temenos Integration Framework. M-Shwari brings mobile savings and loans products to 80% of Kenya’s adult population. It is based on Safaricom’s M-Pesa mobile money transfer system that has revolutionised banking in Kenya and which is now being extended to Europe. During the day, CBA’s Temenos Integration Framework was also presented with a ‘Highly Commended’ award within the Innovation and Emerging Technology category.

CBA chose Temenos’ Integration Framework as it 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 the quality of its mobile channel and paperless customer relationship would heavily depend on the seamless integration of a multitude of critical systems. By using the Temenos system, the bank was able to set up, integrate and launch its M-Shwari mobile banking service in just five months; three times faster than originally planned. As a consequence of launching ahead of rival services, M-Shwari has enjoyed extraordinary success, for instance collecting over 1bn Shillings in deposits in its first month of operations. 

The Model Bank accreditation complements the recent XCelent Customer Base award received by Temenos in the Celent report “Big Leagues 2013” as the only global core banking leader. The report details vendors of the number of new-name core banking system deals over the period 1 July 2012 to 30 June 2013, presenting an award to the strongest vendors in each region.

John Schlesinger, Chief Enterprise Architect, Temenos, said

“We are delighted that CBA’s Temenos-integrated M-Shwari product has won the Celent Model Bank of the Year Award. The strong scalability provided by Temenos Integration Framework allowed M-Shwari to attract on average 32,000 new customers per business day during its first 100 days, and by April 2013, in less than half the time originally expected, over 3 million customers had been onboarded. Our involvement in CBA being recognised by Celent in its Innovation and Emerging Technologies category is based on the Temenos Integration Framework, which uses industry-standard Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) technology, allowing codeless integration, and therefore enables implementations to happen much faster, by a factor of  three or four times.”

Bob Meara, Senior Analyst, Celent, commented:

“CBA’s M-Shwari initiative was a bold strategic move to aggressively enter a new market segment, the Kenyan mass market – as no bank has ever done before. This singular initiative significantly improved the state of financial inclusion for an entire nation.”