Achieving maximum scalability with a minimum footprint – Temenos Highwater Benchmark 2024
As a technology provider to thousands of banks globally, our goal is to not only deliver the highest levels of performance, but to do so with as little impact to the environment as possible.
Everything we do is for our clients, so it’s vital that we are able to demonstrate how every engineering improvement, every architectural development, and every technology decision makes us who we are today.
Our annual performance benchmarks help to provide this level of clarity as well as steer our roadmap for innovation, as we’re always looking to push the envelope in terms of transaction performance, response times and efficiency. In previous years, we have concentrated on transaction throughput because we know that this is mission-critical to our clients’ long-term business plans and ability to scale.
Whilst this will remain a fundamental area of focus, this year we went a step further and put sustainability under the microscope, as this has become incredibly important to our clients and the wider banking industry. It may not be obvious, but every interaction with a banking app, payment initiated, loan consumed, and more triggers a sequence of software and hardware operations that leave an environmental footprint. That’s why it is imperative that we do everything we can to minimize these impacts for our clients as well as to enhance our own operations.
This is rooted in our ethos. In fact, what makes it rewarding beyond the ethical merits is the inherent link between sustainability and performance, with sustainable practices often leading to enhanced operational efficiency, as well as lower costs and increased resilience. This synergy has become critical for banks as they seek to optimize their digital infrastructure and reduce their carbon emissions.
So, for our 2024 performance benchmark we took a slightly different approach. Rather than focusing purely on performance like we did last year when we achieved 150,000 transactions per second (TPS), we replicated the needs of a retail bank to deliver over 15,000 TPS and, importantly, highlight how our ongoing engineering efforts are also making our technology more sustainable.
We based our benchmark on our recently launched Retail Enterprise Service, which provides end-to-end banking services including lending and deposits, multi-currency accounts, digital origination and servicing, financial crime mitigation, and payments. We chose our Retail Enterprise Service because we know this high-volume segment is looking for speed and power – but is increasingly conscious of its environmental footprint. The benchmark is based on the Retail Enterprise Service SaaS deployment model, but it is also available to cloud and on-premise clients.
Snapshot of our sustainability achievements
Overall, our benchmark results showed that by enhancing transaction performance through a more efficient code and leaner architecture, we are reducing the need for infrastructure and processing power, which ultimately lowers energy consumption and carbon emissions.
Compared to 2023, we achieved a 42% improvement in response times, doubled our container density, and delivered a 52% overall efficiency improvement. These reflect the improvements we have made throughout the year, which all our clients benefit from via our single code base.
At the same time, we are committed to supporting our clients as they establish and work towards their ESG goals. Not only are consumers and investors looking more closely at banks’ efforts and targets here, but climate-driven regulations have joined the list of reasons why banks are accelerating their shift to the cloud.
From this sustainability perspective, I’d like to emphasize some of our achievements in 2024 as we continue to focus on delivering scalable software while minimizing its environmental impact:
- We removed the need for an API message broker, reducing our reliance on hardware. This lowered API response times and in turn reduced costs and emissions.
- Meanwhile, we have selected a new serverless platform for our microservices, again lowering response times and using 52% fewer core resources.
- Where the outbox pattern previously relied on a streaming service, we moved the ingestion through a near-time architecture as a new way of running workloads, lowering the number of cores required.
- We have also transformed the way we deploy the business logic, allowing us to selectively deploy software as required. This means we can deploy our software much faster, contributing to up to 2.3x transactions per second per core, and 33% better response times.
These are just a few examples of our ongoing engineering efforts and new applications of technology in our architecture. With these changes, we continue to optimize our code and architecture, which reduces infrastructure needs, lowers energy use, and decreases carbon emissions. This has been validated by our partnership with GoCodeGreen, whose assessment showed that from a 2021 baseline we reduced the carbon impact of our software by over 50%.
The road ahead
As the adage goes, “change is the only constant”, and never has this been truer in our industry, where technological advancements, including in the areas of automation and AI, are rapidly transforming systems and processes to revolutionize banking and customer experiences.
In fact, a large bank I was speaking with earlier this year underscored how our clients are thinking about their long-term technology needs, which increasingly involves considering sustainability factors too. They are assessing their needs not just based on where they are today, but where they see their future trajectory.
With this bank, transaction volumes were projected to grow exponentially, requiring a platform that could scale accordingly. The prospect was delighted when he saw the results of our benchmark, as they gave him the confidence that Temenos would be a reliable long-term technology partner to facilitate his bank’s future growth.
We’ve been delivering change since opening our doors over 30 years ago. Another important aspect of this is examining who we partner with and who our vendors are to make sure they align with our sustainability objectives.
We have big ambitions for our next benchmark, and I’m excited to reveal that one of the major developments you can expect to see is our transition to serverless deployment, which will be another milestone in the continuous evolution of our cloud-native platform. Whilst we work on the details of our next benchmark, we welcome your thoughts and perspectives on the areas that will impact your organization’s technology needs in 2025 and beyond.
Click here to learn more about the Temenos Sustainability Benchmark.