CreditAccess Grameen is India’s largest microfinance institution. It has 4.9m customers and manages assets of over $3.2bn. It employs 19,400 people across nearly 2,000 branches nationwide. Its mission is to be the preferred financial partner for low-income, rural households who lack access to traditional credit, with women making up more than 99.99% of its customer base. It offers a range of microfinance loan products, including business capital, home improvements, family welfare, and emergencies.

 Adapting to local challenges

Relatively low-levels of financial and digital literacy are a big challenge for India, says Sudesh Puthran, CreditAccess Grameen’s CTO. Alongside this, there is a lack of available credit history for people and a diverse mix of 20-25 native languages to cater for. That explains why CreditAccess Grameen employs a vast network of branches nationwide. “We don’t have English-speaking people sitting in our central office managing each village. Instead, we employ local people to work in each village. That fosters a greater relationship between the customer and us.”

A lack of internet connectivity is another issue that CreditAccess Grameen has had to overcome. “We have designed systems that allow our managers to process loan applications offline when connectivity is unstable, and then flush these into our core banking platform when access is back up.”

Customer-centric innovation

Fixing these challenges is the reason why CreditAccess Grameen has become the number one microfinance institution in India and is now more than twice the size of its nearest competitor. “We have designed products suitable for our customers’ situations. We understand that their reality and needs are different from urban customers, and so they need a different approach. Unlike in the city, rural populations don’t tend to get a regular monthly salary. They might get income on a weekly or daily basis, so we align our repayment schedules accordingly.” Sudesh describes this approach as customer-centric innovation.

Low-cost growth

The approach works. CreditAccess Grameen’s annual survey of its customers has seen a steady uptick in satisfaction levels, with over 98% of customers being satisfied with our service delivery. This has driven customer retention rates of 88%. That is coupled with relatively low running costs, achieved by running an agile, lightweight, and automated operation. “We are able to manage annual growth of around 22% in the last four years without exponentially increasing headcount, including expansion into the northern states.” These efficiencies are then passed onto the customer in the form of the lowest interest rates in the market.

Pioneering technology

Since 2015 CreditAccess Grameen has used Temenos core banking to drive efficiencies. Prior to that, it relied on the integration of multiple open-source legacy solutions, which proved challenging in terms of sustainability, support, and data integrity. It was the first microfinance company in India to understand the benefits of deploying a core banking platform and was attracted to Temenos because of its specific capabilities for microfinance. “By leapfrogging onto Temenos’ core banking platform, we put all our issues to rest immediately.”

Customizability and scalability

Customizability has been a major gain. “We can offer our customers all sorts of tailored solutions. For example, flexible repayments (that align with a customer’s income cycle), loan moratoriums necessitated during the COVID-19 pandemic, the ability to perform regulatory obligations like interest subvention by the government during COVID-19 and specific state public holidays have all been easy to configure.” With ready-made lending products also accessible via the Temenos platform, such as automotive or gold-backed loans, CreditAccess Grameen has been able to significantly fasten its time-to-market for new products.

Scalability was the other reason behind CreditAccess Grameen’s decision to choose Temenos.

One outcome has been the time to onboard new customers, which has been cut from 10-15 days to less than a week since the process was digitised and automated. With around 11,000 new customer applications being accepted every day, the efficiency savings are amplified.

Expert execution

Recently, CreditAccess Grameen has doubled down on its partnership with Temenos. It has extended its Temenos environment to Madura Micro Finance, a business it acquired; and it has upgraded to the latest version of Temenos core banking, working with Nagarro (a Temenos partner) on the implementation. “Nagarro and Temenos were great experiences overall. We had extremely strong support from Temenos to ensure the implementation went smoothly. They understood that engagement with our end business users is really important and that ongoing testing is critical to success. They were key features of both projects.”

As a result, the upgrade was considered stable after just a month from switch-on. Previously, this would take at least six months, says Sudesh. “There was hardly any downtime and we didn’t see a dip in business volume beyond 2-3 weeks, which can normally be for much more period with upgrades.”

This efficiency is carried through to new feature releases and software updates, which are enabled twice monthly. “Having a core banking platform encourages us to make these changes frequently, and keeps our business aligned with our customers’ needs.”

Deeper ties

Looking to the near future, the API architecture of the Temenos core banking platform will support CreditAccess Grameen as it moves into open banking, explains Sudesh. “The fact that we have the Temenos core banking platform will give us an edge to comply with the open API framework.” Other areas of exploration include data lifecycle management, data analytics, data lake, and Temenos Banking Cloud.

We partnered successfully with Nagarro

Nagarro is a global digital engineering leader with a full-service offering, helping Temenos clients become innovative, digital-first companies and enabling them to run intelligent and agile operations powered by data and automation.

Learn more about Nagarro

Romania-based Libra Internet Bank has a reputation for innovation, having launched the country’s first 100% online accounts and loans. It is one of the market leaders for partnerships with financial institutions and fintechs in the European Union. Libra will leverage Temenos’ composable, scalable platform to add other payment rails in future, bringing them together in a single, efficient platform. This will support the bank’s growth plans to double payments volumes over the next five years.

Libra Internet Bank is already using Temenos for core banking. The decision to upgrade Temenos core banking is the culmination of the changes that Libra Internet Bank made to all its electronic and online applications throughout 2013. In less than one year, Libra reconfigured its Internet Banking platform and added tens of new functions, launched the Libra Mobile Banking service and extended the cut-off time for most operations, during evenings and non-working days.

Adding Temenos Payments will allow the bank to simplify and standardize its payments operations on a flexible, efficient platform, increasing Straight Through Processing (STP) rates and enhancing customer servicing. The platform will support the new ISO 20022 based cross-border payment and reporting standards, expanding data transparency and payment tracking services. Libra Internet Bank will also be able to improve its sanctions screening processes, for which it uses Temenos Financial Crime Mitigation solution, by standardizing on robust, scalable integration points with Temenos Payments. Temenos offers a single platform across all banking verticals and business segments, including payments and core banking, and as a result Libra will benefit from higher investment in R&D. With Temenos, the bank will be able to progressively replace its payments legacy systems and accelerate time to value.

Finland’s wealth manager bank Aktia, serves more than 250,000 individual and over 20,000 corporate and institutional customers. Aktia offers comprehensive banking and wealth management services through close collaboration between Aktia’s three business areas: Asset Management, Banking, and Life Insurance. In 2013, the bank chose Temenos core banking to increase flexibility and productivity, resulting in improved customer service, including shorter time to market for new products and substantial cost savings.

In 2023, Aktia selected Temenos Payments Hub to support the introduction of pan-European instant payments and consolidate all payment rail processing onto a single platform. Adding Temenos Payments Hub will allow the bank to scale, simplify, and standardize its payments operations for all customers.

The move is part of a strategic platform modernization to deliver a better customer experience for domestic and cross-border payments with improved efficiencies and to meet continually changing regulatory and compliance requirements. By running core banking and payments on a robust, API-first, flexible and highly configurable platform, the bank benefits from integrated accounts and payments processing and low latency execution which is required to deliver high levels of Straight Through Processing (STP) and efficient customer experiences. Choosing Temenos’ cloud-native and cloud-agnostic platform also future-proofs Aktia’s technology strategy, enabling an initial on-premise installation with flexibility for seamless migration of its core banking and payments to the cloud or to SaaS.

One of the progressive banks in Sudan, Africa and Gulf Bank (AGB), has ambitious growth plans as it seeks to bring innovative Sharia-compliant products for its customers within Sudan and internationally to the Sudanese diaspora. AGB has a collaborative vision to develop a payment ecosystem in the country that will drive financial inclusion objectives, foster a culture of digital payments, and channel formal inward remittances. The bank selected Temenos to modernize its digital and core banking capabilities. The Temenos solution, hosted on the cloud, will enable AGB to provide innovative products faster to retail and corporate customers in Sudan and around the world.

Sudan has a digitally savvy population and a growing fintech industry offering a variety of banking services. Backed with Temenos core banking, AGB will utilize Temenos digital banking as a true omnichannel, multi-experience platform helping the bank to serve its customers on multiple channels and devices using native features. AGB has a customer-centric, digital-first business strategy focused on providing innovative financial products and services and a branch-lite network of outreach to individuals, small and medium-sized enterprises, and corporate customers. Temenos digital and core banking will enable the bank to leap forward in the evolving digital economy of the country by providing modern-day products and financial services in Sudan.

Lien Viet Post Joint Stock Commercial Bank (LPBank) is one of the top 10 private commercial banks in Vietnam in terms of assets and equity. LPBank is replacing its existing system with Temenos’ modern technology platform that will enable the bank to manage customer accounts and transactions across its retail and corporate activities with improved performance and efficiency, and offer personalized products, faster and at a lower cost.

By adopting Temenos’ Vietnam Country Model Bank, LPBank will leverage pre-configured banking capabilities tailored to the local market that will enable faster and more cost-effective implementation. The solution will support process automation, thereby minimizing operational errors, improving risk management efficiency, and enabling fast, effective digital transformation. The bank will also benefit from Temenos’ continued investment in its single code base and experience working with 3000 banks across 150 countries.

At a glance

• 4 months to implement Temenos core banking platform
• 50-70% faster timeframes for new product launches
• 6 months to launch new online mortgage products

Next Bank is a native digital challenger bank headquartered in Taipei, serving retail customers. It launched in January 2022 and is one of only three banks in recent years to have obtained a digital banking license in Taiwan. It is committed to creating banking services that customers may never have imagined with innovative thinking, design aesthetics, and friendly experiences. Its main shareholder is not from a traditional banking background, but instead is Taiwan’s largest telecommunications company – Chunghwa Telecom. That goes some way to explain its challenger mentality.

The speed with which Next Bank has captured market attention will encourage Taiwan’s older banks to innovate, predicts Eric Lee, its Chief Information Officer. “Many banks in Taiwan have been established for a long time and are relatively rigid. For them, transformation is a heavy burden.” He offers mortgages as an example of the lack of innovation in the sector. “In the traditional housing loan experience, customers need to go into a bank branch to complete their application. With Next Bank, customers can do everything on their mobile. I think this is a pioneering work.”

Rapid launch

This new online mortgage offer was built and launched in just six months, using the Temenos core banking platform. “Our entire mortgage business, from project approval to overall launch, took only six months,” explains Eric. “That speed is a huge competitive advantage, and will become more so as we launch new products into market.” That short timeframe is largely down to the rapid deployment of the Temenos core banking platform, which took just four months. “We were so impressed by the quick and smooth implementation of the Temenos core banking platform. It meant we could get to work earlier on building our mortgage offer,” adds Eric.

Eric highlights that the speed with which Next Bank launched its new mortgage service has created a stir in the sector. Shortly after the launch, Taiwan Bank, the nation’s largest bank, sent one of their top designers to Next to exchange lessons on how to create a 100% online mortgage product.

Configurability the key

Mortgages are just one service in Next Bank’s new product portfolio, alongside accounts, loans, and insurance. It has all been built and runs on the Temenos core banking platform. Key to the choice of Temenos was the configurability of the platform, explains Eric. “Like every country, Taiwan has specific regulations that differ from other countries. Off-the-shelf solutions would have been very painful for us to customize and integrate. With Temenos this capability is built-in, so launching a new product is much faster.” As an example, the six months it took to launch its online mortgage product represents a 50-70% reduction in the typical timeframes for these projects.

Next Bank will be making the most of this capability. Its next product offers—corporate management and wealth management—are expected to launch very soon, with foreign exchange planned for Q1 2024.

More capabilities under one roof

The breadth of integrated capabilities included on the Temenos core banking platform has made it easier and faster for Next Bank to quickly secure a market presence.

The assurance of experience

Reputation was another key reason why Next Bank selected Temenos. Eric notes that Temenos was able to demonstrate deep knowledge of the Taiwanese market and a successful track record of deployments with other banks in the region. For example, in 2022, Shanghai Commercial and Savings Bank appointed Temenos to replace its legacy core systems. The success of that deployment gave Eric and his team the proof they were looking for. And plans for Temenos to open a dedicated support hub in Taiwan have provided further reassurance.

Other institutions in Taiwan are looking at the Next Bank story with interest. “The balance of standardization and configuration of the Temenos composable banking platform delivers the agility, speed, and cost-effectiveness that can be a good option for legacy and neobanks alike,” says Eric. It also means that separate bank branches can use the same instance of the platform, rather than needing to deploy their own core system.  And the extra competition will be a good thing, he adds. “In this way, we can have more industry exchanges, which is helpful for talent training and innovating the ecosystem.”

BanCoppel is one of the largest organizations in Mexico, which includes brands such as Afore Coppel and Tiendas Coppel. BanCoppel was the first to offer loans to Mexicans who had no possibility of proving their income, providing them with microloans for small purchases with store credit since 1941. To continue its technological transformation, driving modern banking services, the bank selected Temenos core banking platform. The implementation of this platform will not only provide the bank with greater efficiency and sustainability but will also support BanCoppel’s digital transformation project.

BanCoppel will benefit from Temenos’ proven technology leadership, extensive experience in Mexico, and strong reputation with existing customers. The Temenos core banking platform will enable the bank to continue to scale efficiently as well as offer an integrated ecosystem of easy and accessible banking services.

At a glance

• Reduce onboarding to loan application completion to 5 minutes from days
• 40% lower operational costs
• Time to launch new products to market cut by third
• 25% increase in customer base since launch
• 80% improvement in workflows and efficiencies

In just over a decade, Ijarah Finance has become an established part of the Saudi financial landscape. It provides Sharia-compliant integrated financial leasing services to 50,000 customers across the Kingdom, growth that has been built on a commitment to honesty, customer service and innovation. Now, these values have been applied to ‘Mora Finance’ a new digital lending platform built in partnership with Temenos. Mora’s easy, fast, and safe financing solution has attracted more than 10,000 registrations in four months, since launching in March 2023. It includes cash loans and product financing; with other business products to follow later in 2023.

Empowering citizens

Launched in 2016, Saudi Arabia is now well into its ambitious ‘Vision 2030’ transformation. Digitization is at the heart of its broad commitment to modernize every aspect of the Kingdom, and personal finance is fundamental to that plan. Citizens who are more able to access financial services and loans become more powerful consumers, and in turn support the shift to a consumer-driven and entrepreneurial economy.

Ijarah Finance identified this and has developed a new, fully automated personal lending platform. Named ‘Mora’, it is the amongst first wholly digital lending solution in KSA and offers customers the chance to apply for and secure personal loans in less than five minutes. That speed is partly enabled by the Kingdom’s move to democratize its data, meaning financial companies such as Ijarah can tap into national databases that record an individual’s income and credit history. But access to data is meaningless without the technology to fetch and process it. For this, Ijarah selected the Temenos Banking Platform to build Mora on top‌ of.

The result is the Kingdom’s first fully digital loan application and approval service. So far, 5,000 Saudi citizens have secured loans via Mora, while registrations are forecast to more than double by the end of 2023, reaching 25,000.

Though a digital solution, Mora is also appearing on shop floors, as in-store product financing agents advise customers to download the app rather than join the hours-long queues to submit their paperwork in the traditional way.

A platform for now and the future

Mora is the first solution that Ijarah Finance has built on the Temenos Banking Platform. Indeed, the partnership, which began in 2021, was prompted by the shortcomings of the company’s previous technology stack. Unlike Temenos’ unified and composable platform, Ijarah Finance had relied on a complex integration of multiple vendors. That stilted innovation, and so Ijarah’s ability to launch new products efficiently.

“The best part of the Temenos platform is that it is one single, fully integrated, core banking solution. Everything is all in one box.” Jamshed Afzal Chief Technology Architect, Ijarah

Mora has been built using Temenos’ core banking and digital services, with Temenos XAI about to be deployed too. These solutions have not only aided the development of Mora, but also give Ijarah access to other capabilities and services that they can switch on anytime in the future. For example, Ijarah has also invested in Temenos Payments Hub, with a view to developing payment processing services in the future; and is also exploring Temenos Financial Crime and Mitigation (FCM) and native analytics tools.

Imagination is the only limit for Ijarah. The API architecture of the Temenos Banking Platform has consigned intricate and costly integrations to the past, while the customizability and extendibility of modules allow Ijarah to build highly personalized customer experiences and flex to evolving regulations.

“Every country, even every bank in a country, has its own needs. A rigid platform creates overheads and compromises, whereas the Temenos platform can be easily configured. So you become fearless. You always know that you’re going to be able to adapt to local and organizational needs” Jamshed Afzal Chief Technology Architect, Ijarah

The result is a newfound agility and scalability that will become increasingly important as Ijarah looks to build out Mora with new features and create new products and services that they can bring to market at breakneck speed. These benefits will become amplified when Ijarah migrates Mora to the cloud version later this year. That had not been possible earlier because of the Kingdom’s strict data sovereignty laws and the absence of a public cloud hyperscaler. But with the Temenos platform agnostic to deployment environments, this did not delay progress. Mora was launched on-premises, and Ijarah was then able to make the decision to move to Oracle cloud as soon as an infrastructure option became available.

Trust in the tried and tested

When you’re building a product designed to transform a nation, you don’t want to leave anything to chance. This was one of the principles that brought Ijarah to the doors of Temenos.

Scale without order can be complex. Whereas other global technology companies are little more than a loose amalgamation of disconnected services, Temenos is a single entity—a unified platform of integrated and complementary solutions, all accessed via a single API connection. Put simply, this makes things work easily. Mundane and repetitive tasks are automated, reducing development and operational workloads. Data can be leveraged between applications, with these insights used to deliver superior customer experiences. All the while, costs and lead times come down, cutting the time to market for new products, and ensuring new revenues are realized faster.

The success is in the numbers

Ijarah has seen an immediate return on its partnership with Temenos. Average loan approvals are already running at a higher conversion rate per day, and are expected to ramp up by 4 -5 folds per day by autumn 2023. Speed has been a key driver. Previously, it took new customers days to register and apply for a loan, leaving many frustrated (some of whom will have abandoned their application). Today, new customers of Mora can go from initial onboarding to loan confirmation in less than five minutes, all from the convenience of their mobile device (Ijarah will be launching a web version of the Mora app later in the year). And more are doing just that—Ijarah has seen a 25% increase in its customer base since launching Mora.

More customers at less cost is another key takeaway. Operational spending is expected to be reduced by 40% in year one, a combination of automating processes, consolidating systems, and outsourcing maintenance. In turn, Ijarah has more budget and time to deploy to new ventures, and importantly, more inclination too. It now takes them around one month to develop and push new features and products to market, just a third of the time it took before.

“Previously, we had to write code for everything. That code had to be tested. With Temenos, integrations are low code, so everything is accelerated. This has given us a big advantage” Jamshed Afzal Chief Technology Architect, Ijarah

This improved proximity from the design to the revenue stage emboldens the appetite for innovation and enables action. Ijarah reports that workflows and efficiencies have improved by 80% since partnering with Temenos. A credit card and e-wallet are the next products that Ijarah is now developing and will deploy on the Temenos Banking Platform by the end of 2023.

All these markers of success combine to improve profitability, with a 40% increase in the return on equity.

Launched in 2002, Rawbank aims to drive economic growth in the Democratic Republic of the Congo by providing financial services to retail, business, and corporate clients. In just over 20 years, Rawbank has expanded to become the largest commercial bank in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

As the bank expanded its share of the market, it needed to scaleup in its lending division. Previously, Rawbank assessed loan applications manually—a time-consuming and labor-intensive method that offered limited insight into the probability of clients defaulting on repayments. Moving forward, the bank wanted to improve its decision making and minimize exposure to risk by gaining a deeper understanding of applicants. In addition, the bank looked to accelerate the approvals process to deliver a higher standard of service.

Realizing that automation offered the smartest approach, Rawbank decided to use the Temenos Explainable AI (XAI) platform to streamline and improve its risk assessment for retail, SME and Corporate lending. The solution will enable the bank to rapidly develop, deploy, and integrate predictive risk models into its credit scoring workflows to determine the likelihood of applicants meeting repayment schedules. XAI will also provide transparency into how it calculates credit scores, enabling Rawbank to explain lending decisions to clients and regulatory authorities.

With XAI providing deeper insight into loan applications, Rawbank expects to reduce its loss given default rate and increase net profits on lending considerably. As well as protecting against default risk, increased levels of automation will improve the speed and efficiency of loan approvals, ensuring higher quality of service. And the bank will be able to continuously optimize the predictive models to ensure accuracy.