Credito Emiliano S.p.A

Reinforcing innovation leadership with simple, secure, and user-friendly mobile banking apps

Reggio Emilia, Italy

At a Glance

● 9 months to develop and launch a new mobile banking app, later reduced to just 4 months for subsequent apps.
● Over 550,000 customers now actively use the bank’s apps
● Contributes to 30% annual growth in mobile app usage
● 95% of total transactions run on digital channels
● 57% of digital banking is on mobile only, resulting in 33% increase of transactions

One of the ten largest banks in Italy, Credito Emiliano SpA (Credem) has been helping customers to manage their finances for more than 110 years. Headquartered in Reggio Emilia and listed on the Borsa Italiana stock exchange, the bank offers wealth management services alongside retail, business, and corporate banking. With 1.5 million customers, Credem reported total assets under management of EUR 65 billion.

Digital services are a strategic priority for Italian banks, especially since the pandemic has limited access to physical branches. As the battle for market share intensifies, they strive to differentiate themselves from the competition with online and mobile services that place simple, secure, and intuitive financial tools at users’ fingertips.

Fabio Caliceti, Head of Digital Channels, Credem, explains: “We are evolving our business model, pushing very strongly towards a full omnichannel service, with an optimal mix between human and digital to meet the highest and most demanding client needs. To build long-lasting relationships with customers, with regard to digital channels, we aim to make every digital touchpoint and digital contact as frictionless and easy to navigate as possible.”

Fostering a culture of established digital innovation

In 2019, Credem committed to innovation by working on various initiatives. These included setting up a stronger connection with the fintechs and introducing new leading-edge technologies such as automation, artificial intelligence, and chatbots to enhance the bank’s services.

This emphasis on innovation has sparked strong growth across Credem’s digital channels, but the bank saw opportunities to improve its mobile banking app. With its previous development platform, Credem found adding new features and performing maintenance a time-consuming and labor-intensive process.

Andrea Ferrari, Head of Touchpoints, IT Department, Credem, adds, “There was a risk of our mobile app becoming outdated and falling behind the competition. Our platform vendor offered no real technology roadmap, with limited investment in new functionality. We had significant growth in app usage, but we need to make ongoing improvements to maintain that momentum.”

Innovation takes many forms, and a relatively new focus for Credem is on extending ESG-related services beyond traditional enterprise customers to retail.

Andrea Ferrari clarifies, “We are launching a new project to understand what we could do as a bank on the ESG side, in line also with new European regulations, to help our customers better understand their environmental impact. And being able to share our ESG focus and goals with Temenos who is committed on sustainable business practices for a while, is certainly an advantage for us.”

Selecting a low-code development platform

Credem planned a new mobile app for retail banking, private banking, and small and medium-sized business customers called “Digital Banking” with a fresh design and a rich array of tools to empower users to manage their accounts. It was subsequently decided to build dedicated apps for each audience. To build the two new apps, Credem assembled a team of developers, business analysts, and Product Owners, and decided to use Temenos digital banking on Temenos SaaS with infrastructure running of AWS.

Temenos offered a very useful low-code platform that would allow our teams to develop the new mobile apps in JavaScript and bring new front-end features to market rapidly. Cloud and CI/CD are two pillars of our IT strategy, so we also wanted a partner with proven service delivery capabilities, letting us the opportunity to stay focused on new functionalities. The Temenos team demonstrated considerable experience using CI/CD methodologies to test, develop, and deploy new banking apps.”

– Andrea Ferrari, Head of Touchpoints, IT Department at Credem

He adds, “The Temenos SaaS ensures that we avoid the hassle and costs of managing infrastructure, which has formed a key part of our IT strategy for many years. The cloud model also gives us elastic scalability, allowing us to provision resources at the click of a button during testing and development.”

Developing and launching quickly—despite the pandemic

Credem started the implementation just as the pandemic struck, with lockdowns sweeping across Italy. To keep work moving forward, the project team moved to a remote deployment and development strategy, based on an agile framework. Working together, Credem and Temenos completed the discovery phases, created and tested the alpha version of the new app, and launched the full version on the market in just nine months.

Completing such a complex project fully remotely wasn’t easy at all, but Temenos helped to minimize disruption, bringing wide-ranging skills and competencies to the table, this, added to a strong commitment from Credem people has achieved the goal of completing the development and launching the new app in nine months; a really excellent result.”

– Andrea Ferrari, Head of Touchpoints, IT Department at Credem

During the development process, Credem made full use of Temenos Country Model Bank functionality, which provides prebuilt workflows, such as payments and money transfers, that, after some evolutions defined during the project, are now fully compliant with local Italian financial regulations, helping to reduce project complexity and accelerate time-to-market.

The omnichannel low-code Temenos platform was pivotal to success, as Andrea Ferrari confirms, “With the Temenos solution, we were able to use the same code for both the iOS and Android versions of the app. We could work as a single, unified team throughout, focusing all our strengths on a single technology and not splitting on different mobile operating systems. Our users found the Temenos platform easier than other technologies, we have invested time in skilling our people, and in a short time we have been proficient with the tools.”

Leveraging on the know-how to deploy new apps

Following the successful launch in January 2021, Credem gradually rolled out the new apps to approximately 450,000 individual and SME customers.

In early 2023, Credem built on the success of these apps with the release of two new mobile apps for the needs of private banking customers from Credem Euromobiliare Private Banking, which is part of the Credito Emiliano group, one for individuals and another for businesses.

And they were built much faster this time round. As Andrea Ferrari explains, “These two new apps were built in four months each as we leveraged the paradigm of the previous apps and the experience of the team involved. It was quick and easy to adapt the current apps to create the new ones.”

Furthermore, it is easier to deploy new features and enhancements. In 2023 alone, Credem launched 11 version updates. It’s a record, as Andrea Ferrari highlights, “We are delighted with the Temenos digital platform, which allowed us to deploy 11 releases in nine months. It is exceptional and it’s indeed more than five times the number of releases per year we had prior to working with Temenos”. The number of releases further increased in 2024 to an impressive 12 version updates for the main retail application and another 16 for the Private Banking and SME applications.

Delivering a superior in-app experience

The apps features a simplified, frictionless design and interface that makes it easy for users to navigate the various menus and features, while multi-factor authentication, including biometrics options, ensures the highest levels of security. Credem has also embedded the mobile token used for authentication and transactions in a smoother fashion.

Within the apps, Credem customers can activate and manage cards, view transaction records, make and schedule transfers, top up prepaid payment cards, and as well as manage bill and tax payments.

Recently, Credem just launched its first 100% digital-only savings account and has signed 15,000 brand-new customers already. They can now apply for new debit and credit cards via their app, rather than having to go into a branch.

Andrea Ferrari explains why this new offer is a gamechanger, “It’s enriching our customer proposition. We are offering something remote for people who don’t want to come into a branch and who prefer to stay at home.”

Andrea Ferrari adds, “With Temenos, we can make enhancements to our mobile app that were more complex with our older platform, ensuring that we continue to improve the user experience. The solutions enable us to develop and bring new services to market rapidly; we have already introduced smart credit card management and payments options, and added account aggregation.” And users are responding positively to these enhancements. The new apps now average four stars in Apple’s and Google’s app stores, up from three stars.

Moving forward, Credem also intends to harness third-party integration tools leveraging the partner ecosystem Temenos Exchange, to further enhance its mobile banking services, as Andrea Ferrari explains, “With Temenos Exchange, we can connect seamlessly to leading-edge fintech solutions, avoiding the complexity of in-house development. Temenos gives us all the tools that we need to cement our status as a leading innovator among Italian banks.”

Attracting more and more app users

Working with Temenos to develop these apps has helped Credem to attract new users for its mobile banking services. In recent years, the bank has achieved consistent 30 percent annual growth in app usage and downloads, with over 100 million transactions across all its digital channels.

Today, Credem’s apps are used by over 550,000 active customers, while 95% of total transactions now run on digital channels (Mobile, Online Banking, etc.), keeping the mobile application at the core of digital evolution process. Indeed 57% of customers accessing the bank’s digital services are doing so, solely through one of Credem’s apps.

In the first 12 months the bank has seen a 41% increase in app downloads, a 39% increase in logins, and a 17% rise in app active users. This rate of adoption has resulted in a 33% increase in the number of transactions and payments performed via mobile. Fabio Caliceti adds, “Temenos has been an important pillar in the ongoing growth of our mobile app. Along with the dedication of our development teams and our strong focus on innovation, the Temenos solutions have helped us to accelerate our digital transformation and evolution towards omnichannel service delivery.”

Credem has redesigned its online banking channels using Temenos, building streamlined journeys for every stage of the customer lifecycle, from onboarding and origination onward. The new web-based digital banking experience and instant payments are the new projects that are in implementation. Credem values the partnership with Temenos and the ability to have workshops between both teams to align roadmaps.

Temenos is a great partner to Credem, always sharing useful information and looking to assist us in new ways. With Temenos, we are building innovative digital banking services that will help to strengthen our ties with our customers and differentiate ourselves in a competitive market. We are confident that we are looking at a brighter future, and Temenos will be a key part of this.”

– Andrea Ferrari, Head of Touchpoints, IT Department at Credem

We partnered successfully with

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is a secure cloud services platform, offering compute power, database storage, content delivery and other functionality to help businesses scale and grow.

Region

Europe

Solutions

Cloud & SaaS
Digital Front Office

Sector

Business Banking
Corporate & Commercial Banking
Retail Banking
Wealth Management

Credito Emiliano S.p.A

Reinforcing innovation leadership with simple, secure, and user-friendly mobile banking apps

Reggio Emilia, Italy

At a Glance

• Temenos Core deployed in just four months and digital in nine months

• Time for new product developments cut to hours

• Customer base grown 19x from 700k to 13.2m

• Able to onboard tens of thousands of customer every day

• Loan portfolio growing by 50% year-on-year

Cooperative Bank of Oromia (Coopbank) is an Ethiopian bank established by farmers 19 years ago. Their influence remains strong; more than half of the bank’s shareholders are still farmers, and it remains focused on the MSME farming and agricultural sector, which contributes more than 80% of the national economy, yet suffers from high levels of financial exclusion.

Coopbank is well on its way to fulfilling its goal to be the leading private bank in Ethiopia by 2025. It is already one of the country’s most profitable banks, with a total asset value of more than ETB 139.56 billion, operates 745 branches, employs more than 15,000 people, and has more than 13 million account holders, covering retail, corporate and institutional clients.

Nobody left behind

At the heart of this ambition is a mission to transform livelihoods and empower communities. “That is ultimately what we mean by innovation,” explains Aman Semir, the bank’s Vice President for Technologies and Digital Banking. “It’s really about solving people’s problems.” That mission goes hand-in-hand with a focus on ESG. “We’re early on in that journey, but we’re starting to see the fruits of our framework. For example, around 100 branches are now fully powered by solar and wind energy.”

Half of those branches are containers that have been modified. “We locate them in remote places where there is no electricity, and provide free Internet. For the people around there, they have become more than a bank branch. They are education and community gathering centers.”

Aman calls this the bank’s ‘phygital’ approach

You can’t be a digital bank without first educating people. So we need the physical place where this can happen.In parallel, it is building for the era of open banking. We’ve leveraging open APIs to integrate any third party to our bank.”

Aman Semir, Vice President Technologies and Digital Banking at Cooperative Bank of Oromia

It is this dual track – of both readying for future opportunities while ensuring nobody gets left behind – that marks the Coopbank out.

A great fit from the start

To deliver this strategy, Coopbank turned to Temenos, deploying the core banking platform in 2016. “Everyone had become frustrated by our legacy system. Staff were having to stay in the office until midnight to record the day’s work, such as new accounts opened. You just can’t grow with that sort of inefficiency.”

The bank found its way to Temenos through a combination of Gartner ranking and reviews, RFP response, customer references and personal experiences of employees. It has not looked back. “From the start, Temenos was a really great fit. The past six to seven years have proved that our choice was the right one.”

The evidence for that is everywhere. In that time the bank has grown 19x its customer base from 700,000 to 13.2 million, and is now growing its asset value by 40% year-on-year. Loan portfolio has been growing 50% year-on-year for the past six years, and deposits have increased 39% to 42% in the same timeframe

In the face of sharp growth, the platform has proved scalable and flexible. It can accommodate anything. We can come up with any new product, any configuration or third-party integration, and the system just handles it all.”

Aman Semir, Vice President Technologies and Digital Banking at Cooperative Bank of Oromia

Aman paints a before and after comparison to illustrate his point. “Before Temenos, just to come up with a simple saving product would have taken us a long time. We were forced to go to our vendors and wait for them to configure their systems. But now we can do that in just a few hours, both in-house development and third-party integrations.

Powerful partnerships

For these projects the bank accessed the Temenos certified partner network to source its implementation partners – USI for the initial implementation, Inlaks for the upgrade, and Xpert Digital to enable Temenos digital.

“It’s always been a smooth and fast process – just four months for the initial deployment, and nine months for Temenos digital.” Aman recalls that, back in 2016, the bank chose not to involve Temenos in the implementation, but instead used the model bank configuration. “The scope and flexibility of that template meant when we upgraded, there was nothing to change. It was almost too good to believe!”

Deepening the partnership

As well as upgrading the core banking platform to the latest version in 2023, Coopbank also added Temenos Trade Finance, which it uses to offer interest-free banking to Islamic customers.

With Trade Finance we have enabled automations that have reduced processing times, so that now the back-office runs more smoothly.”

Aman Semir, Vice President Technologies and Digital Banking at Cooperative Bank of Oromia

The bank has also enabled Temenos digital to its suite. “It’s brought customer onboarding to the next level. We’re now able to onboard tens of thousands of customers every day, and give them a world-class experience.” It means the bank can be confident in making ambitious projections. “In the next 12 months we aim to onboard more than five million customers.” Aman explains.

On the way to the top

Aman explains that Temenos has become so important to the bank that the partnership is seen as one of the critical halves of its operation, alongside leadership. As such, it plans to double-down on its investment. “Even though we upgraded the platform just a year ago, we’re already considering adding more modules, so we will probably not wait another three to four years to do another upgrade, but get on with that very, very soon.”

Aman is confident about what that will mean for the bank’s future.

Seven years ago, when we started with Temenos, we were ranked number 11-13 nationally in most banking parameters. Now, we are a number three or four bank, and we are improving all the time. We’re a proud and happy Temenos customer.”

Aman Semir, Vice President Technologies and Digital Banking at Cooperative Bank of Oromi

We partnered successfully with

Inlaks

Established in 1982 as a division of Inlaks Plc, Inlaks has grown consistently to reach the leadership position it has attained today.

Xpert Digital

Xpert Digital (XD) is a Certified Temenos Services Partner specializing in delivering exceptional digital experiences by creatively nurturing innovation with technology.

Region

Middle East & Africa

Solutions

Core Banking
Digital Front Office

Sector

Business Banking
Corporate & Commercial Banking
Islamic Banking
Retail Banking

Credito Emiliano S.p.A

Reinforcing innovation leadership with simple, secure, and user-friendly mobile banking apps

Reggio Emilia, Italy

Telenor Microfinance Bank, the Operator of Pakistan’s leading digital payments platform Easypaisa, required scalability, automation, agility, and a proven technology platform to offer personalized, customer-centric products while allowing for lower operational costs and increased return on equity. Temenos’s best-in-class solutions and System’s implementation expertise enable Telenor Microfinance Bank to innovate faster and provide customers with much-needed access to digital savings accounts and micro-loans.

We have always remained true to our mission of transforming Pakistan into a cashless society through collaboration and technology. Our partnership with NdcTech to implement Temenos solutions has added a vital component to our services infrastructure, which will catapult our move towards digitization. By going live on the platform, we can now fast-track our digital transformation journey and come up with more innovative digital financial solutions for our customers in a more efficient manner.”

M. Mudassar Aqil, CEO at Telenor Microfinance Bank/Easypaisa

Telenor Microfinance Bank went live on Temenos, the next generation in core banking, Temenos Financial Crime Mitigation (FCM), Temenos Advanced Collection (TAC), and Temenos Analytics and Reporting, to deliver a seamless, simple, and secure digital experience to its customers while ensuring sustainable growth. Additionally, these solutions will enhance controls, increasing the bank’s ability to comply and achieve operational excellence.

We partnered successfully with

Systems Limited is a global technology public limited company founded in 1977 with the mission to offer holistic transformations to its clients.

Region

Middle East & Africa

Solutions

Core Banking
Financial Crime Mitigation

Sector

Business Banking
Challenger Banks
Corporate & Commercial Banking
Retail Banking

Credito Emiliano S.p.A

Reinforcing innovation leadership with simple, secure, and user-friendly mobile banking apps

Reggio Emilia, Italy

Pakistan’s Largest Bank, HBL, select the Temenos core banking platform to provide domestic and international operations with a cutting-edge banking experience. The Temenos implementation will include a full suite of client-friendly products and services that will provide end-to-end, technologically advanced solutions to both HBL’s conventional and Islamic banking clients.

HBL will onboard over 25 million of the Bank’s clients onto Temenos open platform for composable banking. Fast onboarding and quicker transaction processing will provide a more seamless client experience, enabling HBL to increase its digital footprint across Pakistan and internationally.

The open technology platform provided by Temenos is flexible, global-ready and has the breadth of banking services to meet our clients’ fast-developing banking needs. This partnership contributes to our goal to become a ‘Technology company with a banking license”

Muhammad Aurangzeb, President & CEO at HBL

The new platform will accelerate the Bank’s services across all segments, markets, and channels and will also enhance adherence to local banking regulations and improve reporting standards for international markets in China, GCC, Europe, and SAARC countries.

At HBL, we are always looking at better ways to serve our clients. By adopting this leading platform, we will add to our capability to give clients an improved experience when using our services, now and for many years to come.”

Sagheer Mufti, Chief Operating Officer at HBL

Region

Middle East & Africa

Solutions

Core Banking
Digital Front Office

Sector

Business Banking
Corporate & Commercial Banking
Retail Banking

Credito Emiliano S.p.A

Reinforcing innovation leadership with simple, secure, and user-friendly mobile banking apps

Reggio Emilia, Italy

At a Glance

2.5 million customers and 6.9 million accounts successfully migrated
Managed 2 releases a month
Shorter time-to-market to launch new products

Named again among America’s Best Banks by Forbes, Commerce Bank, top 50 US Bank, has been serving customers for over 150 years. With a long-term view and a focus on the customer, Commerce operates utilizes the “super community bank” model, which requires bringing together sophisticated banking products with high-touch, high-tech delivery to create and build deep relationships.

It means that Commerce Bank attempts to combine the back end of a large regional bank offering the products and services that you would expect with the front end of a community bank or a smaller bank with deep personal relationships, excellent customer service, bankers that are empowered to solve problems.

Like every bank, Commerce Bank was facing both external and internal challenges. Externally, it’s the explosion of digital solutions, and particularly the competition from fintechs, especially in the US facing shifting customer expectations. Internally, Commerce Bank is struggling with what is usually referred to as technical debt- managing those 30-plus-year-old systems and making the system do modern things.

Commerce Bank sought the next long-term strategic partner and a platform that shares the same vision of the future and had a common culture. The bank was seeking for a modern, integrated, extensible, highly configurable platform. And finally, the Commerce bank was considering cloud options in the long term and the economics and the flexibility would really help them drive value.

Commerce is focused on staying at the forefront of technology to ensure the best service to our customers. We recognize that a modern core banking platform is an accelerator for innovation and digital customer experiences. The Temenos platform will enable Commerce to deliver innovative solutions for our customers today and well into the future.”

David Roller, Chief Information Officer at Commerce Bank

Commerce chose Temenos as its strategic technology partner for its highly flexible, agile banking platform. Temenos’ modern platform increases operational efficiency and enhances Commerce’s ability to innovate and incorporate emerging technologies. The Temenos U.S. model bank approach helps Commerce to meet the unique business and regulatory needs of the market in an efficient and cost-effective way. This milestone completes its modernization project to move from its legacy systems for deposits to a modern, agile and open platform tailored for the US market.

In the quarter following the implementation, customer satisfaction and customer retention scores were either maintained or improved across all Commerce’s business segments. The great collaboration of Commerce and Temenos teams has enabled the migration of 2.5 million customers and 6.9 million accounts – spread across over 360 different product types. The bank was also able to do two releases a month and is working towards doing more. With Temenos open platform for composable banking Commerce is delighted to be able to grow and scale and shorten the time to market for new products. The super community model is a long-term strategy for Commerce coupled with big picture macro trends around digital, analytics, and automation on modern cloud architectures.

To deliver differentiated digital solutions to their customers, Commerce developed an enterprise digital strategy across their consumer wealth and commercial businesses. To connect customers to bankers Commerce launched during the pandemic, Commerce Bank Connect, based on the Temenos engage platform. It is a customized solution that allows customers to connect with a banker of their choice right from their smartphone.

Commerce helps high-net-worth individuals simplify their complex financial lives and by the end of 2022, Commerce will launch a Temenos-based private banking lending solution to keep ahead of the competition. Lastly, Commerce is modernizing its payments framework based on the Temenos payments engine, they aim to be an early adopter of the Instant Payment product introduced next year by the Federal Reserve Bank.

“Temenos has, as we’ve discovered the right technology, but also the US model bank has the regulatory support for us. We spent a lot of time with you working on it, and we believe it’s ready. But I’d also say that you have the people to deliver. So yes, we would recommend it.”

David Roller, Chief Information Officer at Commerce Bank

Region

North America

Solutions

Core Banking
Digital Front Office
Payments

Sector

Business Banking
Corporate & Commercial Banking
Retail Banking
Wealth Management

Credito Emiliano S.p.A

Reinforcing innovation leadership with simple, secure, and user-friendly mobile banking apps

Reggio Emilia, Italy

Trusted Novus Bank, the oldest established bank in Gibraltar, is envisioning to transform its banking services to keep pace with the rapidly evolving digital era, grow its database and improve digital customer experience. To bring this vision to life, Trusted Novus Bank’s legacy core and front office system will be replaced with Temenos core banking and Temenos digital banking on the Temenos Banking Cloud to ensure agility and flexibility of systems.

With the Temenos Banking Cloud, we can deliver personalized, real-time customer experiences on a scalable platform that will foster innovation and keep the bank at the forefront of technology, and at the same time be true to our vision and values.”

Christian Bjørløw, CEO at Trusted Novus Bank

Through Temenos Banking Cloud’s ability to self-provision banking services, a sandbox to create and test applications, and a marketplace of pre-integrated fintech solutions, Trusted Novus Bank will have the ability to now create personalized, real-time customer experiences for the everyday banking needs of its retail, corporate and private banking clients. Trusted Novus Bank expects this technology adaptation to allow employees to focus on value-adding, customer-facing activities and essentially meet its goal to grow its customer base over the short to medium-term.

Region

Europe

Solutions

Cloud & SaaS
Core Banking
Digital Front Office

Sector

Business Banking
Corporate & Commercial Banking
Retail Banking
Wealth Management

Credito Emiliano S.p.A

Reinforcing innovation leadership with simple, secure, and user-friendly mobile banking apps

Reggio Emilia, Italy

Demand for digital banking has surged in Malaysia since the COVID-19 pandemic, as lockdown measures have prevented citizens from accessing branch-based services. To meet the need for easy-to-use online and mobile banking, financial services group KAF planned a new suite of digital lending services. The group will harness the Temenos Banking Cloud to develop and launch new conventional and Islamic financing offerings, including seamless onboarding and origination, and fast, automated loan processing.

We chose Temenos as we needed the agility and speed of a SaaS solution, and only the Temenos Banking Cloud offered the breadth of financial services functionality to meet our current and future needs. Critically, it enables us to bring together digital lending for conventional and Islamic products on a single platform and seamlessly extend to full digital banking services. With Temenos, we will lead the way in bringing new and exciting digital financial products and services to all Malaysians.”

Thariq Usman Ahman, Deputy CEO at KAF Investment Bank

Using the Temenos platform, KAF will be able to innovate quickly and scale efficiently, incrementally bringing to market a full range of digital fund management, investment banking, and stockbroking services. This will help individuals and businesses to rebuild prosperity and recover from the significant economic hardship caused by the pandemic.

The road ahead for Digi Banks

Listen to the conversation with Rafiza Ghazali, Director of Digital Banking at KAF Investment Bank, and host Swapnil Deshmukh, Regional Director for Digital Banking at Temenos talking about the changing bank landscape, customer expectations from digibanks, digibank success, and the partnerships between digibanks and other fintechs.

Listen to the Podcast

Region

Asia Pacific

Solutions

Cloud & SaaS
Core Banking

Sector

Business Banking
Challenger Banks
Islamic Banking
Retail Banking

Credito Emiliano S.p.A

Reinforcing innovation leadership with simple, secure, and user-friendly mobile banking apps

Reggio Emilia, Italy

At a Glance

• Number one ranked app for mobile banking functionality available in Ecuador

• 185% increase in user interactions with the mobile app since deployment of Temenos digital banking

• 312% rise in financial transactions completed on the mobile app in the last two years

• Winner at the ‘Financial Innovators of the Americas Awards 2021’ run by Fintech Americas

Innovation and solid, dependable service have earned Banco Bolivariano a position as a top-five bank in Ecuador, with 821,000 customers and USD 4 billion in assets under management. Founded in 1980, the bank initially focused on the corporate and SME sectors, but also now targets the high-net-worth market with retail banking products, including current and savings accounts, credit cards, and money transfers.

Placing digital transformation at the center of its growth strategy, Banco Bolivariano has developed many ingenious offerings. For example, the bank is the only one in Ecuador to offer customers the option to check their online account in seconds using a ‘quick view’ feature. Banco Bolivariano also builds partnerships with leading cloud providers to explore the use of API gateways for potential future Open Banking initiatives.

Ronald Romero Morán, Head of Digital Channels at Banco Bolivariano, explains: “As most Ecuadorian retail banks offer digital services, we use innovation to stand apart with a unique user experience. From using chatbots to adding fresh features to our online banking platform, we aim to make every digital interaction as quick, simple, and frictionless as possible, leaving our customers more time to focus on the things that matter most to them.”

Planning a more intuitive mobile banking experience

Within its digital channels, Banco Bolivariano identified room for improvement in its mobile banking app, known as 24móvil. Previously, the bank used an application from a local external vendor to run, but they needed a provider with a roadmap of innovative and world-class banking solutions. As a result, the app was falling behind the mobile services offered by competitors, and Banco Bolivariano goal is to become the best digital bank in Ecuador.

Gustavo Molina Flores, Chief of IT at Banco Bolivariano, comments: “We were using legacy solutions that needed almost constant updates and large amounts of time-consuming patching. Maintaining compatibility with new releases of mobile operating systems was also very difficult, and we did not have the tools to build and roll out new features quickly to meet evolving customer preferences.”

Setting its sights on delivering the best mobile banking app in Ecuador, Banco Bolivariano planned a new approach. The bank looked for a best-of-breed platform that would deliver leading-edge innovation capabilities, and enable its developers to enhance the user experience, adding features such as seamless onboarding, greater security, and more flexible payments services.

Deploying best-of-breed development tools in the cloud

To optimize its 24móvil app, Banco Bolivariano sought a partner with a proven track record helping major financial institutions to build first-class mobile banking services. A clear solution roadmap was essential, along with sophisticated development tools to improve time-to-market for new features. After assessing available options, Banco Bolivariano chose to deploy Temenos digital banking solution running on the Temenos banking cloud.

Temenos showcased real expertise and experience in digital banking, along with an excellent solution. The development framework in Temenos digital banking was especially impressive, allowing our teams to incorporate pre-built and optimized functionality into our app. Choosing the Temenos banking cloud aligned with our cloud strategy, and enabled us to switch off legacy infrastructure, reducing our costs.”

Ronald Romero Morán, Head of Digital Channels at Banco Bolivariano

Working with Temenos, Banco Bolivariano implemented the solution and recently completed an upgrade to the latest version, as Gustavo Molina Flores explains: “Although a complex process, integrating Temenos digital banking with our back-office and core banking environment was much easier than expected. Since then, the Temenos banking cloud has facilitated upgrades, keeping us up-to-date with new capabilities.”

Building a culture of innovation across the bank

Using Temenos digital banking, Banco Bolivariano developed and launched a range of more customer-centric mobile services. For example, the bank introduced faster and more user-friendly onboarding processes, cutting-edge biometric authentication options, and peer-to-peer payments. Where the bank’s previous mobile solutions stifled innovation, Temenos digital banking enables its developers to reduce time-to-market for new features.

One of the most impressive aspects of Temenos digital banking is the number of functionalities including the depth and breadth of these that are ready to deploy, from security to money transfer services. We can easily customize our mobile app, and create a simpler, more engaging user experience.
Also, high levels of performance and native integration with different operating systems remove many of our previous challenges.”

Kyra Arcia Marcano, Chief of Innovation and Marketing at Banco Bolivariano

The deployment of Temenos digital banking forms part of a much wider emphasis on innovation throughout Banco Bolivariano. Recently, the bank adopted agile project management practices to adapt quickly to changing market conditions and strengthen commercial performance. Banco Bolivariano feels confident that implementing the Temenos solution is supporting the progress of this wide-ranging cultural transformation.

Kyra Arcia Marcano adds: “Across the bank, we are taking steps to move faster and improve our service delivery. We have built a technology ecosystem that helps our development teams to design, test, and launch new products. With its extensive ready-made capabilities, Temenos plays a crucial role in enabling us to turn innovative plans into reality.”

Getting ahead of the competition

With the enhanced 24móvil app, Banco Bolivariano is differentiating itself from market rivals and winning more customers. Their last NPS score was 57 compared to an average of 49 from competitors. User feedback for the app has been highly positive, with an app rating of 4 out of 5 stars on Android and 3 out of 5 on iOS.

In the two years since the project launch, Banco Bolivariano has seen the average number of monthly users of the app rise by 127 percent, total user interactions with the app increase by 185 percent, and financial transactions completed through the app grow by 312 percent.

Today, we are joint-ranked as number one in Ecuador for mobile banking app functionality. With the upgrade of Temenos digital banking, we are confident that we will soon get a step ahead and position ourselves as the outright leader in the market. Before, we risked falling behind our competitors; now other banks look to Banco Bolivariano and try to replicate our approach.”

Ronald Romero Morán, Head of Digital Channels at Banco Bolivariano

Continuing a prize-winning partnership

The project with Temenos has earned Banco Bolivariano widespread praise from across the American financial services sector. Most notably, the bank recently won silver at the ‘Financial Innovators of the Americas Awards 2021’ run by Fintech Americas in the ‘Customer Experience (CX) & Engagement Innovation’ category. Building on this success, the bank is continuing to explore other use cases for Temenos digital banking.

We are now considering how to recreate our first-class mobile banking experience for our corporate clients. Thankfully, Temenos offers an excellent long-term roadmap that helps us to understand where the market is heading, and how we can harness new functionality to stay ahead. Whatever the future holds, we know Temenos will provide the expertise and solutions we need to innovate and succeed.”

Kyra Arcia Marcano, Chief of Innovation and Marketing at Banco Bolivariano

Region

Latin America

Solutions

Cloud & SaaS
Digital Front Office

Sector

Business Banking
Corporate & Commercial Banking
Retail Banking
Wealth Management

Credito Emiliano S.p.A

Reinforcing innovation leadership with simple, secure, and user-friendly mobile banking apps

Reggio Emilia, Italy

United Bank Limited (UBL) is one of the largest banks in Pakistan with 11 million customers. In Pakistan, UBL stands apart as a pioneer of ingenious, user-friendly digital banking products and services. In recent times, the rapidly-growing bank has launched the first digital Islamic bank accounts available in the country, along with a unique mobile payment app. The pioneer in digital banking, UBL is working with Temenos and Systems to further leverage the Temenos platform to provide an integrated, digital experience for all retail and corporate customers, covering the entire customer lifecycle from onboarding and origination to servicing.

UBL has gone live with Corporate Lending on Temenos digital banking platform as part of a comprehensive digital transformation of the bank’s retail, SME and corporate banking for domestic and international customers on the Temenos platform. Temenos Digital Banking is the leader in driving customer acquisition and digital banking engagement with its scalable platform, deep analytics, and AI scoring models. The platform enables banks to increase digital revenues and reduce customer onboarding time significantly. The go-live covers loan originations to five segments, including large conventional banking corporates and group companies, Islamic banking corporates, Agri enterprises, Financial Institutions and Small & Medium Enterprises.

We are delighted to go live with corporate lending on Temenos digital banking platform. The solution enables us to elevate the digital experience for corporate customers and achieve operational excellence, helping us to increase customer satisfaction and drive revenue growth. We look forward to building on this success and our close partnership with Temenos and NdcTech.”

Spokesperson at UBL

The Temenos Corporate Loan Origination solution, implemented with NdcTech, will help UBL to meet the growing demand for digital customer experiences and win business with corporate clients in a highly competitive lending market that has seen demand slowed by global economic conditions and rising interest rates. Temenos solution enables UBL to strengthen its position as a digital leader, delivering seamless online experiences across the entire customer lifecycle—from onboarding and origination to account management. With these banking capabilities integrated into Temenos digital banking platform, UBL can provide a smooth and seamless digital experience while enabling the bank’s corporate lending teams to access the right data at the right time to make quick, consistent and cost-effective credit decisions.

This partnership with Temenos and NdcTech is a great catalyst in our digital transformation journey. We are very excited to make this a part of our strategic objective of becoming more agile and tailor our platform to better serve the rapidly changing needs of our customers.”

Spokesperson at UBL

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.

Region

Middle East & Africa

Solutions

Digital Front Office

Sector

Business Banking
Corporate & Commercial Banking
Retail Banking

Credito Emiliano S.p.A

Reinforcing innovation leadership with simple, secure, and user-friendly mobile banking apps

Reggio Emilia, Italy

At a glance

• Onboard customers in 5 minutes instead of 60 minutes

• Straight-through processing for 95% of onboarding processes

• 92% faster to compile loan documentation

• Reduce the cost of customer acquisition and servicing

• Provide great digital customer experiences

• Built a new front-to back solution on the Temenos banking cloud

Recently, Challenger, an Australian investment management firm, acquired MyLife MyFinance. In an Australian market dominated by the “Big Four” banks, MyLife MyFinance aims to offer a genuine alternative to the leading players. Headquartered in Melbourne, the bank promises customers fair, ethical, and simple savings and lending products and services, which help them to build a brighter and more prosperous future. MyLife MyFinance, innovation means finding ways to deliver new value to those customers.

Mark Sawyer, General Manager at MyLife MyFinance, explains: “We consider ourselves a niche bank, targeting consumers looking for a transparent, low-fee service. Although we are not aiming to compete directly with the giant retail banks, we want to create a compelling and market-relevant value proposition that compares favorably with their offerings and ensures that we serve our customers well.”

As part of this strategy, MyLife MyFinance looked to design a more engaging, frictionless digital experience. For example, the bank wanted to accelerate onboarding processes that previously consisted of many time-consuming, manual steps. MyLife MyFinance also aimed to introduce self-service capabilities that would give customers greater flexibility in how they could manage their accounts and make payments.

Planning digital transformation

To develop and launch this enhanced customer journey, MyLife MyFinance realized that it would have to modernize its core and digital banking systems. Previously, the bank was using heterogeneous on-premise legacy technologies with limited functionality that restricted innovation and scalability. Using solutions from multiple vendors, MyLife MyFinance also wanted to address management workloads and operational risk.

Zvonko Balic, Chief Technology Officer at MyLife MyFinance, continues: “With our existing systems, the cost and complexity of customer onboarding and servicing was simply too high. Also, we saw that the solutions would make it difficult for us to adapt to changing regulations and hamper our ability to capitalize on emerging market opportunities.”

Selecting a more agile model

To transform its technology stack, MyLife MyFinance decided to deploy Temenos front-to-back banking solutions on the Temenos banking cloud. The Temenos package combines Temenos core and digital banking, and Temenos Analytics and provides capabilities within a modern Open API-first architecture.

Mark Sawyer comments: “When assessing vendors, Temenos stood out for many reasons. First, the broad functionality of the solutions enable us to tailor our new customer journey. Also, the rich integration features allow us to connect to third-party solutions to enhance our services. Temenos also has a strong track record working with Australian and global banks, which inspires confidence that they will always deliver.”

The Temenos banking cloud also offered major advantages for MyLife MyFinance, as Zvonko Balic explains: “As a smaller, niche bank, we do not have the technology budget of the larger financial institutions. Adopting the cloud approach meant that we could focus resources on serving customers rather than managing infrastructure. Plus, we know that Temenos invests heavily in building cutting-edge new functionality, which allows us to roll out enhancements quickly and easily rather than having to perform development work ourselves.”

“Adopting the cloud approach meant that we could focus resources on serving customers rather than managing infrastructure”

Zvonko Balic, Chief Technology Officer at MyLife MyFinance

Deploying fast, despite the pandemic

To implement the solutions, MyLife MyFinance worked with Temenos and Temenos business partner LTIMindtree. Within 12 months, the project teams effectively built a whole new banking infrastructure from scratch in the cloud and completed the customer data migration. Travel restrictions within Australia due to the COVID-19 pandemic meant that Temenos completed two-thirds of the implementation remotely.

During the deployment, Temenos helped MyLife MyFinance to integrate the core and digital solutions with a wide array of third-party services. These include solutions for debit cards and payments, document management, fraud monitoring, customer ID verification, and automated credit decisioning for consumer mortgage and lending products.

Being able to go live with such a diverse ecosystem of services in just 12 months was a great result. The disruption caused by the pandemic made this an especially challenging project, but Temenos provided the resources and expertise to ensure success. The engagement with their sales, account management, executive, and implementation teams has been very positive.”

Zvonko Balic, Chief Technology Officer at MyLife MyFinance

Accelerating processes by more than 90 percent

With the Temenos solutions, MyLife MyFinance strengthened its value proposition and enabled a slick, seamless customer journey that matches the offerings of larger operators. The bank now uses straight-through-processing (STP) for 95 percent of the onboarding process, which automates slow, inefficient manual workflows, reduces onboarding costs, and ensures that new customers enjoy a fast, engaging experience.

Mark Sawyer adds: “With our old systems, it would take between 24 and 48 hours to complete the customer acquisition cycle. Within that time, an employee would have to manually key in data and complete various checks on the customer. Now, due to the STP and integration capabilities of the Temenos platform, a customer can submit their application online and open an account within minutes.”
MyLife MyFinance customers also now enjoy self-service capabilities via their digital channel of choice. Users can log in to manage their deposits account and individual profile via mobile or internet banking, make payments using a digital wallet, activate and manage debit cards, and report lost or stolen cards.

Since the final consumer mortgage and lending solutions went live, MyLife MyFinance looks to accelerate the process for compiling loan contract documentation. Previously, it could take up to 60 minutes to draw together relevant documents from various source systems. With the integrated Temenos ecosystem, the bank expects to complete now the process in just 5 minutes—a 92 percent improvement.

Now, due to the STP and integration capabilities of the Temenos platform, a customer can submit their application online and open an account within minutes.”

Mark Sawyer, General Manager at MyLife MyFinance

Spearheading a new growth strategy

Recently, Challenger, an Australian investment management firm, acquired MyLife MyFinance. As a savings and loan bank, MyLife MyFinance will give Challenger the opportunity to expand its customer base and secure retirement income offerings. The bank is confident that the self-service capabilities, STP, and scalability of the Temenos solutions will enable it to manage higher volumes of customer applications successfully. MyLife MyFinance also believes that the Temenos deployment will enable it to embrace the opportunities created by Open Banking

Mark Sawyer concludes: “As we move into a new phase in our banking journey, we are sure that the partnership with Temenos will continue to contribute to our success, helping us to adapt to evolving regulations and market conditions. So far, it has been a very rewarding collaboration, and we are looking forward to the next chapter.”

We partnered successfully with

One-Stop Pure-Play Global Partner for all Temenos Solutions, System Integrations and Digital Services

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