Achieves status as Cambodia’s leading commercial bank
Phnom Penh, Cambodia
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
Achieves status as Cambodia’s leading commercial bank
Phnom Penh, Cambodia
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.”
Achieves status as Cambodia’s leading commercial bank
Phnom Penh, Cambodia
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
Achieves status as Cambodia’s leading commercial bank
Phnom Penh, Cambodia
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
Achieves status as Cambodia’s leading commercial bank
Phnom Penh, Cambodia
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
Achieves status as Cambodia’s leading commercial bank
Phnom Penh, Cambodia
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.”
Achieves status as Cambodia’s leading commercial bank
Phnom Penh, Cambodia
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.
Achieves status as Cambodia’s leading commercial bank
Phnom Penh, Cambodia
At a Glance
● First Fintech to be a fully digital national bank
● 25% cost to service a customer
● With a lower cost/income ratio compared to traditional banks
Varo Bank is re-imagining personal banking. Launched in 2018, Varo is the first consumer fintech granted a national bank charter in the US. Its mission is to improve the financial lives of its customers with a unique range of high-yield savings accounts, spend tracking and cashflow. Varo provides innovative digital banking services to 180 million Americans currently underserved by the traditional system.
Varo’s efforts to build a better kind of bank powered by modern cloud technology have been recognized nationally. Varo has been named as one of the Inc. 5000 2023 fastest growth companies in the U.S.
One of the main factors that differentiates Varo is its technology platform. The bank based its architecture around open API’s and the cloud. Varo partnered with Temenos and is using its core banking, Temenos Payments and Temenos digital banking services on the cloud. For Varo it was very important to find a bank partner, who could support its hyper efficient cost model in order to pass real value back to its consumers.
Temenos is a great partner for us to help that rapid cycle of products iteration, gaining insights and be able to continue to deliver solutions that solve real pain points for consumers.”
Colin Walsh, Founder & CEOat Varo
Using Temenos cloud-native APIs, Varo can develop new products such as home loans and credit services, launch them rapidly to the market, simplify compliance with American banking regulations, and scale operations seamlessly as momentum builds behind its customer-first approach.
Temenos Banking Cloud has helped the bank to bring innovative products to market faster and at scale to meet the surge in digital banking. Temenos Banking Cloud enables Varo to scale based on customer demands, deploy new products quickly, and drive down operational costs substantially. The broad functionality of Temenos Banking Cloud allows Varo Bank to meet specific business needs and support its regulatory requirements.
With a lower cost/income ratio compared to traditional banks, Varo now offers market-leading digital banking services at a lower cost and expands financial inclusion for millions around the US.
It was really important to find a bank partner like Temenos. We would not be as nimble if we were working with other core banking providers.’’
Achieves status as Cambodia’s leading commercial bank
Phnom Penh, Cambodia
Finabank, the fourth largest commercial bank in Suriname, is expanding rapidly and has tripled its assets over the past three years. To continue this momentum, the bank launched a comprehensive transformation renovation of its IT landscape and deployed Temenos core banking, Temenos digital banking, and Temenos Financial Crime Mitigation. The solutions will provide modern core banking, business intelligence, and digital capabilities, along with advanced biometric security and multi-lingual functionality to accommodate Dutch and English-speaking users and customers. The integrated Temenos infrastructure will enable Finabank to develop innovative new digital offerings that consumers can access from even the most remote regions of Suriname—keeping the bank on course for further growth.
At Finabank we seek to provide tailored financial solutions fully aligned with our customers’ needs. During our selection process, Temenos demonstrated a clear understanding of our business objectives and how to achieve these with its proven technology. With the flexibility of the new platform, we will be able to respond to market needs and create new value-added products and services as we grow.”
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