At a Glance
- Achieved a 70% reduction in workloads for the bank’s internal development teams
- Able to schedule one upgrade at least per year per subsidiary with a 50% shorter execution time.
- Create development environments within a day instead of 5 days
- Consolidated 4 separate core banking instances to a single technical stack
- Completed initial upgrade of Temenos Core in 6 months following a phased, low-risk strategy
- Reduced cost operation by 1M USD compared to previous setup
- There has been at least 90% improvement in overall automation testing
Founded in 1838, Mauritius Commercial Bank (MCB) is the oldest and largest banking institution in Mauritius. MCB provides a range of personal, corporate and institutional banking services through a local network of 40 branches. The bank also maintains a strong regional presence, operating through subsidiaries and associated companies in Madagascar, Maldives, Mozambique, Seychelles, Dubai, South Africa, Kenya and France.
Although MCB has a long history, it has always focused on looking forward. The bank has built a reputation for innovation, being the first financial institution to introduce ATMs to Mauritius in the 1980s. It was the first to launch a mobile banking app: MCB Juice, which has since, upgraded several times to allow users to check their accounts, transfer funds, manage cards, pay bills and view investments among others all while on the move. A new beta version of the mobile banking application is under test that will reveal further enhancement and new functionalities.
Reza Chady, Architecture Chapter Lead at MCB, confirms: “Innovation plays a very important role in our culture, and we pride ourselves on being able to adapt to a demanding operating environment. Today, customer preferences and regulatory requirements are evolving rapidly. To stay ahead of the change, we need banking systems that are flexible and adaptable, while also providing a secure environment for delivering our services.”
Getting fit for the future
As part of this continuous push to innovate, MCB set out on a journey to update and transform its core banking infrastructure. The bank has been using Temenos Core since 2007 and, after years of expansion, it felt that the time was right to change the bank’s setup. Key objectives for MCB were rationalizing what had become a complex systems landscape, and achieving greater economies of scale and speed across multiple subsidiaries and banking functions.
“Our core banking landscape has not grown in a very uniform way,” explains Reza Chady. “Previously, we maintained 5 different versions of Temenos Core, with individual environments for each operating entity. This approach was overly complex, and made it difficult to scale the business and execute new strategies in a unified way—not to mention adding considerable cost and management overheads.”
Core banking, upgraded
To rationalize and streamline its core banking environment, MCB decided to consolidate all of its separate entities on one centralized Temenos Core technical stack, running in its private cloud. This cloud-powered platform has shaped the heart of a new digital backbone at MCB, transforming current business and operational processes to gain greater efficiency, agility and innovation.
For its new private cloud environment, MCB opted for a container-based architecture. The bank’s development team already had a positive experience using the Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform for creating containerized applications for its digital channels. So naturally, the team was keen to build on the platform again when it came to the core banking renovation.
Assembling an expert team
The core banking upgrade and private cloud migration represent one of the bank’s most ambitious recent projects. To minimize risk and ensure a smooth execution, MCB engaged Temenos services experts for their support and guidance.
Managing a project of this scale and complexity requires precise coordination among all partners and a high level of trust. We were very pleased with the strong working relationship we built with Temenos. The collaboration between our teams has been extremely productive, and that’s evident in the quality of the deliverables.”
Reza Chady, Architecture Chapter Lead at MCB
Adopting a low-risk, step-by-step upgrade strategy
Together, MCB and Temenos identified that a phased approach was the smartest way forward for the upgrade project—reducing complexity and risk. As the first stage in the implementation, MCB migrated the core banking environment of one of its entities in the Maldives onto the latest version of Temenos Core.
Reza Chady continues: “The initial upgrade took around six months to complete and went very smoothly. Since then, the latest version of Temenos Core has been working perfectly, as is the Red Hat OpenShift environment. The combination of Temenos and Red Hat has proved really powerful, and we are very pleased with the stability and performance we have achieved since the upgrade.”
Following Maldives successful and smooth upgrade, we proceeded with MCB Mauritius core banking upgrade from R23 to R24. Following another positive outcome and smooth implementation, this upgrade has been extended to our remaining regional subsidiaries—Seychelles has been upgraded to R24, while Madagascar continues on R23, ensuring alignment with regional deployment strategies.
Currently, the Mauritius COB time has been reduced to around 2 hours 20 minutes from an initial average COB time of around 7 hours.
Strategic Adoption and Modernized Management with OpenShift
MCB strategically selected the OpenShift Container Platform as its container orchestration solution for its robust enterprise features, which have greatly enhanced operational agility and efficiency.
Leveraging OpenShift, each Application Server instance is deployed as an independent Pod, simplifying management and ensuring isolation. Horizontal Pod Autoscalers (HPA) dynamically scale workloads based on performance metrics, while Prometheus provides real-time monitoring and alerting for proactive system oversight. In addition, OpenShift’s rollout-based restart mechanism enables application instances to restart without service interruption, ensuring zero-downtime deployments and improved service availability.
Ongoing initiatives
In parallel, the bank is rolling out the Temenos Extensibility framework, which will allow it to connect its core banking platform to different third-party services.
MCB is deploying Temenos Payments Hub in November 2025 and evaluating the Temenos Data Hub to enable near-real-time data processing.
Increasing agility and cutting costs
MCB is already getting compelling results from its core banking upgrade. With Temenos Core running in its private cloud environment, MCB has opened up a whole new world of agility and scalability, which has already accelerated time-to-market for new client services with a streamlined development pipeline. MCB will now be able to schedule one upgrade at least per year per subsidiary with a 50% shorter execution time.
Today, we’re deploying new services faster, with fewer issues during release management and more controlled access to production. Before, it took around five days and the efforts of multiple teams to create new development environments; now, we create them within a day. We estimate that this has resulted in a 70% reduction in workloads—and we expect to build on these efficiencies as we automate more workflows.”
Reza Chady, Architecture Chapter Lead at MCB
The bank is also unlocking major cost savings by consolidating on a single core banking instance and database, as Reza Chady explains: “By migrating to Temenos Core in our private cloud, we expect to reduce our hardware estate by at least 70%. Likewise, by consolidating from individual instances to a single core banking platform and database, we expect to realize significant savings on licensing costs, as well as administrative and maintenance resources.”
Reaching new horizons
The benefits and value of the core renovation will only increase as MCB works to bring more of its entities onto the latest version of Temenos Core. Building on the well-established partnership with Temenos, the bank is looking forward to a brighter future.
We have been working with Temenos for 15 years now. In that time, it has been amazing to see how far their technology has come. Temenos Core has evolved into a truly modern, sophisticated platform with a robust architecture and rich capabilities. We are very excited to have Temenos as the backbone supporting our ongoing digital transformation.”
Reza Chady, Architecture Chapter Lead at MCB
We partnered successfully with
MCB Consulting
MCB Consulting Services Ltd (MCB Consulting) has been fully incorporated in June 2014 as a wholly owned subsidiary of MCB Group Ltd, the largest financial services provider in Mauritius and increasingly in the region.
Red Hat
Providing a clear modernization path to adopting a cloud strategy for core banking, digital banking, wealth management, fund management, and payments systems.