Building a pan-African presence with innovative, customer-centric digital services
Conakry, Guinée
Vista Bank is bringing a fresh approach to the African banking sector. To appeal to customers ranging from individual consumers to small and medium-sized businesses, Vista Bank set out to create innovative, user-friendly digital banking services. To realize this vision, the bank deployed Temenos core banking and Temenos digital banking—providing an integrated ecosystem of core banking, analytics, payments, and digital solutions. With the scalability and pre-configured local best practices of the Temenos solutions, Vista Bank has the platform it needs to achieve its strategic goal of expanding beyond its core markets in Sierra Leone, The Gambia, and Guinea to build a customer base in 15 African countries by 2025.
I am delighted that through our partnership with Temenos, which leverages their 25 years of industry expertise, we now have the most sophisticated, innovative, cloud-native banking platform.”
Building a pan-African presence with innovative, customer-centric digital services
Conakry, Guinée
As its previous banking solutions reached end of life, Coast Capital seized the opportunity to refresh its core environment and introduce more business and product flexibility for its 595,000 members. The credit union—the largest in Canada by membership—deployed Temenos core banking for retail banking, gaining the ability to perform in-depth analysis of customer data that would shape its growth. Armed with deep insights into member preferences, Coast Capital is rolling out more personalized services, ensuring greater customer satisfaction today and in the future.
Temenos comes to us with solutions, with ideas and they actually really understand where we are going and understand how the product can serve our members better.”
Jeff Wong, Chief Business Transformation Officer at Coast Capital Savings
Building a pan-African presence with innovative, customer-centric digital services
Conakry, Guinée
ACLEDA started life providing credit to small and medium-sized businesses operated by victims of war in Cambodia. Following a strategic shift, ACLEDA entered the banking market, and implemented Temenos core banking to underpin the transformation. Using the Temenos platform, the bank has developed retail services including loans, online accounts, cash management and trade finance. These packages have won ACLEDA the status of Cambodia’s leading commercial bank and enabled international growth in Laos and Myanmar.
Temenos is the software company that invests on R&D that can help any kind of their clients from microfinance, retail banking and corporate banking and drive them into a competitive market.”
Sokleng Meng, VP & Deputy Head of IT Division at Acleda Bank
Building a pan-African presence with innovative, customer-centric digital services
Conakry, Guinée
At a Glance
● 50% reduction in time required for end-of-day processing
● Achieved a 200% uplift in mainstream core processes
● 6 months to upgrade the solution supporting loans, bonds, and deposit operations
● Improved currency management and distribution across banks
The State Bank of Pakistan is a critical hinge in the country’s financial system. As the nation’s central bank, it holds responsibility for securing economic stability through the regulation of monetary and credit systems while aiming to encourage economic growth and development. Achieving these goals means the bank requires the most reliable, advanced infrastructure—and, as 2015 came into view, it decided the time was right for a comprehensive update of its core systems.
Since 2000, the State Bank of Pakistan has been using Temenos Solutions, when it implemented two instances of Globus G11 software—the forerunner to Temenos core banking—one for its currency operations, and another for its banking functions. But as time and technology moved on, the bank realized it needed a more open architecture to support greater integration with other systems.
The Upgradability Business Model
Impressed with the latest Temenos software release, the State Bank of Pakistan decided to upgrade from Globus G11 to Temenos core banking R15. But this created a new challenge, as while the bank had been using the older solution, the Temenos software had undergone a complete re-architecting, with major functional changes. In effect, the State Bank of Pakistan was looking to skip 15 years of new releases in one go.
Luckily, the bank discovered it could take advantage of flexible upgrade paths engineered by Temenos.
The bank had a very demanding request, but the Temenos platform has the built-in functionality to accommodate this. At the program level, we could upgrade rather than replace code, and instead of migrating data, we could convert it. The Temenos philosophy of ‘designed for upgradability and change’ holds true.”
At the outset, the State Bank of Pakistan identified managing and mitigating risk as the main requirement for the implementation strategy for the upgrade project. The bank did not simply approach the changeover from a narrow technical viewpoint, but more importantly, realized there would be major implications from a business process and people change management perspective.
To smooth the 15-year release jump, the State Bank of Pakistan decided to perform the upgrade in two stages back-to-back, with each upgrade a big bang in itself. In the first step, it would upgrade the Globus instance for its currency operations, along with the underlying hardware and operating systems, to a more open environment. One of the key objectives of the first upgrade was to gain knowledge and build experience to make the second implementation a simpler task.
Valuable Lessons Learned
The value of this staggered approach was clear by the end of the project: while the first upgrade took 12 months, the bank completed the second—for the solution supporting its loans, bonds and deposits operations—in just six months.
The implementation highlighted several lessons for people and business change management. Firstly, training and face-to-face support for users was vital to build up their knowledge of the systems and familiarise them with the new processes. Also, data cleansing before the upgrade, along with extensive and exhaustive testing, was hugely important to the success of the project.
By completing multiple rehearsal activities, the bank could maximize user involvement and seize the opportunity to verify data following each run-through. This rigorous approach also enabled the bank to establish processes for robust issue tracking and rapid resolution of major issues encountered during testing.
Key Benefits of the Upgrade
Although running upgrades is often regarded as simply an IT and technical exercise, State Bank of Pakistan recognized that the project would be vital to its overall operations and open the door to continuous business process improvements. Senior executives across the bank monitored progress, provided constant support, and ensured the upgrade investment plans aligned with the expected outcomes.
With the R15 Core Banking solution, State Bank of Pakistan enjoys improved scalability, integration and overall systems performance, along with simplified access to new product updates and periodic fixes. New functionality available to the bank includes role-based dashboards, process workflows, and workflow user events.
These new features, together with other enhancements, have led to greater operating efficiency and productivity, including a 50% reduction in time required for end-of-day processing. The solution also keeps the bank up-to-date with the latest SWIFT messaging standards and global financial regulations.
From the IT perspective, the new Temenos solution is much simpler to maintain and manage, helping the bank to achieve greater product innovation, flexibility and configurability. By moving from a version based on a client-server architecture to the browser-based R15 solution, employees also enjoy easier access, especially those working in the bank’s 16 field offices.
Together, these business and technical improvements will eventually result in reduced total cost of ownership of software and hardware, which will in turn provide additional resources for State Bank of Pakistan to invest in more platform enhancements.
We partnered successfully with
Systems a wholly owned subsidiary of Systems Limited is one of the fastest-growing consulting companies enabling Banks and Financial Institutions to accelerate their mission-critical digital transformations.
Building a pan-African presence with innovative, customer-centric digital services
Conakry, Guinée
Banco Multiva is a relative newcomer to the Mexican financial sector. Founded just seven years ago, the bank aims to challenge more established institutions with high-quality, responsive services. To achieve this, harnessing cutting-edge technology is crucial. Banco Multiva utilizes Temenos core banking solutions to create innovative products for its retail and corporate clients. The Temenos solutions help the bank to evolve its products in tune with constantly changing customer requirements, ensuring client satisfaction and contributing to its competitive advantage over its rivals.
We’ve seen over time, that the solutions that Temenos has offered us are able to develop technically, not only in terms of new advances, which make current processes more efficient but also by offering higher quantitiesand quality in terms of products.”
Building a pan-African presence with innovative, customer-centric digital services
Conakry, Guinée
Allied Bank has a history of growth dating back over seven decades. But to continue its journey in the age of digital services, the bank wanted to refresh its core environment. Its existing systems were designed to serve its extensive branch network but limited the bank’s view of customer preferences and demand. Allied Bank worked with Temenos to implement all-new core banking solutions and gained an in-depth, centralized view of client information that can also support its thousands of branches. With a deeper view of customer data, Allied Bank can start to create new services more closely aligned with shifting demand.
Temenos was part of that process and helped us a lot in terms of training and brainstorming, how to convert this legacy system into a centralized core banking software. We feel that Temenos has good insight into the future of software banking and especially in the area of user experience. We found these products much better than competitors.”
Mujahid Ali, Chief Information Technology Officer at Allied Bank
Building a pan-African presence with innovative, customer-centric digital services
Conakry, Guinée
Bank Alfalah strives to be a forward-thinking provider with the most innovative, relevant products in the Pakistani financial market. To create new offerings closely tied to the needs of each client, the bank replaced its aging and limited legacy infrastructure with Temenos core banking solution. The platform helps the bank to bring all-new digital services to market in quick time and to satisfy growing demand for more personalized packages. More recently, Bank Alfalah added Temenos Data Framework, enabling it to automate data preparation and analytics workflows, accelerating product development even further.
We looked around the market for the best Core Banking system and picked Temenos because of comprehensive business functionalities and its advanced and scalable architecture.”
Mohib Hasan Khan, Group Head ITG/CIO at Bank Alfalah
Building a pan-African presence with innovative, customer-centric digital services
Conakry, Guinée
Banco Azul started in 2015 as the first real local bank in El Salvador. Its goal was to challenge the foreign-owned finance giants who dominate the banking market with superior service and products. To achieve this and support its growth, Banco Azul uses Temenos core banking. The platform enables the bank to bring products to market rapidly and manage thousands of customer accounts. In a short space of time, Banco Azul has onboarded 46,000 customers and now manages 29,000 loans—and with Temenos on its side, it is well on its way to seizing 5% of the banking market in El Salvador by 2020.
We are very satisfied at Temenos core banking and we are thankful to Temenos for the support we have received for the past 3 years, which we visualize, will continue along with our strategy towards the future.”
Oscar Armando Rodriguez, Executive Director at Banco Azul
Building a pan-African presence with innovative, customer-centric digital services
Conakry, Guinée
At a Glance
• Launched the first Taiwanese digital-native bank in 1 year
• About half million customers onboarded in seven years
• Reduced new products’ launch time to 3-4 days
• Reduced customer onboarding time to 2-3 hours
O-Bank is Taiwan’s first digital-native bank. It was initially established in 1999 as Taiwan Industrial Bank, a corporate bank. In 2017, it acquired a commercial banking license so that it could enter the retail space and restructured into O-Bank, or ‘Wangdao’ in Chinese. O-Bank’s Chinese name is drawn from a spirit of inclusiveness, walking the right path, and fulfilling oneself by benefiting others. The English letter ‘O’ represents fulfillment and the unending cycle of life. The bank is committed to sustainability and is focused on delivering innovative financial services products that create win-win outcomes and mutual prosperity for consumers.
Venturing into new markets
Successfully entering the retail banking space is a challenging feat, particularly in Taiwan which is often described as overbanked.
“We only had a year to prepare, build, and launch our retail business,” says Lichen Hung, O-Bank’s Chief Information Officer. “This was a challenge. Since we are a mid-sized operation, we don’t have significant IT resources like enterprise-sized banks, so we are not equipped to build our own infrastructure.”
That’s why O-Bank sought a comprehensive core banking platform, one that could not only enable it to launch quickly, but also support its need to develop and launch personalized, customer-relevant products rapidly.
“Customers are no longer prepared to wait for new products, so we need to act fast,” explains Lichen. “We needed a flexible system to facilitate this and help us deliver personalized offers to our customer base.”
Speed and scalability
Lichen and her team began searching for a solution. Unfortunately, the first two options they found would take more than a year to implement. But then they discovered Temenos.
“The Temenos core banking platform stood out,” Lichen says. “Following discussions with the Temenos professional services team, who shared their previous implementation experience, we were convinced we could make our launch deadline.”
O-Bank was also impressed by the Temenos core banking architecture.
Temenos is much more agile and flexible than other products on the market. We discovered we could launch new products very quickly and without the need for any special coding or extensive technical knowledge. That was very appealing to us.”
Lichen Hung, Chief Information Officer at O-Bank
In 2016, O-Bank began the implementation. Everything went smoothly and, although there were some challenges along the way, O-Bank was supported by the Temenos professional services team, which was on hand to provide coaching and offer advice.
“The Temenos team solved all our difficulties. As a result, we met our deadline and, within 12 months, we were able to open our doors as Taiwan’s first digital-native bank.”
Lichen and her team have never looked back. Today, O-Bank has over half million customers, $21 billion USD in assets, and over $100 million USD in profits.
Much of this success is owed to O-Bank’s new-found ability to operate at speed. For example, with Temenos core, the time to onboard a new customer was reduced from seven days to just two or three hours.
Faster time to market
Temenos core banking is also helping O-Bank to launch new products in a matter of days.
In the past, it has taken us at least three months to launch a new product. But after using Temenos core, we’ve reduced that to three or four days. It takes us a day to set up the parameters, then we spend a couple of days testing, and then we can go live. And as the processes are automated now, we can easily integrate with the surrounding system, so there’s no manual intervention, which is also driving down operational costs.”
Lichen Hung, Chief Information Officer at O-Bank
Using Temenos core banking’s in-built automation tools, O-Bank can personalize new products to specific customer segments without manual intervention. For example, O-Bank has recently launched a multitier deposit account that pays different interest rates depending on the account holder’s financial circumstances. This approach is already proving a hit with customers. In the quarter following O-Bank’s launch of its multi-tiered deposit account, it witnessed a 12% uptick in account openings and a 75% increase in deposit balances.
A growing success
Since its establishment, O-Bank has grown its customer base each year. These customers are sticking around: “Our success comes from attracting new customers and then keeping hold of them,” Lichen says. “Loyalty is a priority”. We partner with a customer, and then take care of all their financial service needs over their whole life.
O-Bank isn’t resting on its laurels. Thanks to its use of Temenos, it is preparing to take advantage of the opportunities arising from open banking by leveraging APIs to connect with external ecosystems.
This will help it to continue to innovate.
Innovation is so important to us. We are already using robotic process automation and generative AI solutions. Building our bank on an open platform like Temenos core banking allows us to take advantage of new digital technologies as they arise.”
Lichen Hung, Chief Information Officer at O-Bank
Powerful partnerships
In the longer term, O-Bank plans to migrate its corporate business to Temenos core, too. “Having one core platform is our ultimate goal,” Lichen says. “We will achieve it through our long-term, strategic partnership with Temenos.”
When asked if she would recommend Temenos to other banks like hers, Lichen replied with an emphatic ‘yes’.
“If you want to launch a digital bank from scratch, then Temenos is your best solution,” she says.
Temenos core banking is ready to use, it has removed many of our problems. We don’t need to employ a team of software developers, and we don’t need to pay people to maintain the system or keep track of its security. Everything is managed by Temenos, which means we can focus on what we do best: delivering a best-in-class service to our customers.”
Building a pan-African presence with innovative, customer-centric digital services
Conakry, Guinée
At a Glance
● Around 4 million daily transactions attributed to its core banking solution
● 91.5% increase in members deposits
● 40,410 new members while reducing slightly the number of employees
Banco Credicoop Cooperative Limitado (BCCL) is a large cooperative bank headquartered in Buenos Aires, Argentina. The bank provides a wide range of services to small and medium enterprises, cooperatives, social enterprises, and individuals through the bank’s 276 branches and 24 service centers.
As a credit co-operative the bank is owned by its members, who hold over 2.65M accounts with the Bank. Being “member-owned” drives a focus on maximizing efficiency and cost control, which is a primary objective of the bank and a catalyst for the decision to replace its core banking system as part of a digital transformation.
Increasing Complexity and Regulation
The goal of this strategic project was to have the necessary technology to ensure the bank could function efficiently in an increasingly complex industry while meeting the constantly changing regulatory requirements. The bank needed to achieve this while maintaining and subsequently reducing costs.
After analyzing 53 different possible solutions in a formal selection process, the bank selected Temenos core banking as it met its demanding technological requirements.
It is scalable, flexible, able to be customized, and provides a wide range of functionality. The fact that Temenos invests significantly in research and development to enhance and enrich the product while designing for upgradability was also an important factor in our decision process.”
Gabriel Skliar, Core Implementation Project Manager at Banco Credicoop Cooperative Limitado
Why is Technology Choice important?
The Temenos core banking system supports a number of industry-standard technologies off a single version of the underlying program code. To BCCL, this meant that they could make the decision on the application platform, the Business Process Management (BPM) tool, high availability architecture, operating system, and database largely independent of the Temenos core banking System. Enabling this choice provided BCCL with the ability to evaluate the technology infrastructure based on cost, support, reliability, etc., and did not lock the bank into this choice. This translates into lower costs and higher service levels for the technology platform that Temenos core banking runs on.
BCCL chose Red Hat, a certified partner of Temenos, to support the implementation of Temenos core banking on an Oracle 11g database. Red Hat deployed the Red Hat JBoss Enterprise Application Platform (EAP) as an application server in cluster mode for the Temenos software, as well as the Red Hat JBoss BPM Suite and Red Hat Cluster for high availability.
The goal of this major strategic project was to have the necessary technology to ensure the bank could function efficiently in an increasingly complex industry, as well as meet changing regulatory requirements while maintaining costs.”
Pablo Recepter, CIO at Banco Credicoop Cooperative Limitado
Managing the Migration Risk
The bank, right from the outset, understood the importance of the business change impact from an employee and customer perspective and wanted to ensure that the benefits of this strategic transformation project were actually achieved. It chose to take an incremental renovation phase-by-phase approach to minimize risk and deliver benefits sooner, while the whole project may take longer to deliver.
Migrating 276 branches, 24 service centers and 2.65M customer accounts is not a trivial task. Given the incremental step-by-step approach, over 130 interfaces were created to enable this progressive co-existence with the bank’s third-party and in-house applications. The bank also created a test bed of 25,000 test cases to ensure that every aspect of the new core banking system and its co-existence with the broader application landscape were tested effectively for both functionality and performance.
Embracing the Digital Revolution?
BCCL now has the core foundations and agility to take advantage of the digital revolution happening in Argentina and throughout Latin America. In 2017, the bank increased the number of members by 40,410 while keeping its number of employees slightly lower than the prior year.
In the two years since the end of 2015, the amount of deposits has increased by 91.5%.
The bank now has a strategic partner in Temenos who helps unravel the complexity while addressing the constant regulation through enhancements and new functionality made available via annual maintenance updates.
BCCL is certainly maintaining, if not reducing, costs, increasing productivity, and, most importantly, delivering a superior customer experience.
We analyze 53 different possible solutions in a formal selection process and found that Temenos core banking met our demanding technological requirements. It is scalable, flexible, able to be customized and provides a wide range of functionality. We also appreciate how Temenos invests heavily in research and development.”
Gabriel Skliar, Core Implementation Project Manager at Banco Credicoop Cooperative Limitado
We partnered successfully with
Providing a clear modernization path to adopting a cloud strategy for core banking, digital banking, wealth management, fund management, and payments systems.
Discover how our platform helps financial institutions navigate change, embrace new opportunities, and deliver smarter, faster banking. Together, we embrace the future of finance – Leading Banking Forward.
