At a glance

• Leading microfinance institution serving over 330,000 customers across Cambodia
• Temenos Financial Inclusion deployed in 2017 to support digitization and expand inclusion
• Upgrade to R22 in 2024.
• 57% customer growth since 2017, supported by a scalable and future-ready core banking system
• Expanded General Loan Portfolio (GLP) by 308% and almost halved its cost to GLP ratio to 4.31%
• Operational efficiency gains, including reduced manual processes and enhanced reporting capabilities

LOLC Cambodia is one of the country’s largest and most mission-driven microfinance deposit-taking institutions (MDIs). With a strong focus on rural communities, the institution provides a range of financial services aimed at empowering underserved populations. Alongside loans, it also offers deposits, a mobile banking application, ATM cards, and local fund transfer services. Since its founding in 1994, LOLC Cambodia has grown to serve over 330,000 customers, with loan assets exceeding $1.5 billion and customer deposits surpassing $1 billion. LOLC is nationally ranked first for number of borrowers and second for loan portfolio and deposit balance. It employs 3,700 people.

Despite this scale, LOLC’s mission remains elegantly simple.

To this end, it has maintained a focus on the low end of the market, with 79% of its clients based in rural areas, and 60% of its loan book made up of group loans and micro loans.

The case for change

Prior to 2017, LOLC was hampered in a number of ways. The legacy core banking system had to be deployed as separate environments in each branch, resulting in significant technical support to maintain them and enable new branch openings. For example, database backups were carried out in individual branches and sent to HO for consolidation, while data was manually written from CD/DVD to tape drive for retention. Product updates required hard coding or SQL server scripting. There was an over-reliance on third-party applications to support some core processes, such as updating loan repayment schedules with EIR (Effective Interest Rate) and generating key reports such as the Customer Poverty Index. Also, individual databases were needed for each currency.

These inefficiencies filtered through to the customer experience. Manual onboarding processes made it difficult for new customers—especially in rural areas—to access financial services quickly. The outdated core banking system lacked flexibility and automation, limiting LOLC’s ability to scale. Regulatory requirements, including IFRS compliance, demanded a more robust reporting and risk management framework. At the same time, a rapidly evolving digital landscape was opening up new opportunities to integrate with mobile banking and real-time payments—such as Cambodia’s Bakong platform—which LOLC was not equipped to take advantage of.

Aligning strategy with solution

In 2017, LOLC implemented Temenos Financial Inclusion as the foundation for its modernization strategy. The decision to select Temenos initially rested on three essential attributes, recalls Sophal

First, cost efficiency. Temenos was shown to offer significant savings over time due to lower maintenance costs and the reduced need for expensive customizations. The standardized configurations and open architecture also contribute to a lower TCO. Moreover, ease of scalability has ensured that costs remain predictable and manageable as the bank expands.

Industry leadership was a second factor.

Finally, LOLC was impressed by the pool of leading technology and consulting firms, certified professionals, and partners in the Temenos ecosystem. These alliances bring additional domain expertise, product innovation, and know-how of successful implementations, giving LOLC peace of mind that modernization could be sustained.

Alongside these strategic pillars were specific capabilities of Temenos Financial Inclusion that marked it out. These included automation and STP to increase operational efficiency; integration with digital banking, CRM, and regulatory platforms; real-time and cross-border transaction processing; multi-branch and multi-country flexibility; the availability of the Product Builder (Wizard) and the ability to originate loans from all channels.

Summarizing its decision, Sophal says, “We selected Temenos Financial Inclusion for long-term scalability, automation, digital transformation, and inclusivity.”

Building on success

In 2024, LOLC completed the upgrade to R22. The update included, among others, migration from TAFC to TAFJ; new hardware, databases, and OS; integration with multiple third-party systems and devices; and the implementation of 12 new modules.

The technical complexity of the upgrade was coupled with stakeholder challenges, explains Duleep Liyanage, CIO. “Colleagues had become very familiar with the R14 version and were resistant to change. We were very conscious about bringing all users with us, so training and communication were a priority.”

The move to R22 was managed by Temenos Upgrade Services (TUS). “They brought a very holistic and systematic approach to the project,” recalls Duleep

Duleep adds that TUS was also highly aware of the importance of stakeholder engagement, with user feedback sessions, incentives and rewards, and milestone celebrations forming a key part of the upgrade project.

Modernization in action

The solution has delivered on its promises. From 2017 to 2024, LOLC expanded its General Loan Portfolio (GLP) by 308%, saw customer numbers grow by 57%, and almost halved its cost to GLP ratio to 4.31%.

Behind these numbers is a modern customer experience. Users are able to open accounts and access services in a fraction of the time and select from a range of highly personalized products. New offers are continually developed and deployed, increasing choice. Digital transactions include integration with Cambodia’s Bakong real-time payment platform to allow instant fund transfers across mobile. Advanced fraud detection, encryption, and real-time monitoring have improved security and trust. And the adoption of IFRS 9 accounting standards has enhanced LOLC’s ability to monitor non-performing loans and manage credit risks effectively.

Tangible impact

Growth numbers alone don’t tell the whole story. “Temenos Financial Inclusion has had a tangible impact on the lives of its customers,” says Sophal. Faster access to loans has helped small businesses and farmers secure funding without long delays. New loan products for women entrepreneurs and small businesses are increasing inclusion and boosting entrepreneurship in the country. Mobile banking adoption has surged, enabling customers in remote areas to manage accounts, send payments, and receive funds without visiting a branch. And simplified deposit services now allow families to save for their future more effectively.

Leading from the front

With Temenos Financial Inclusion firmly in place, LOLC is looking ahead. Plans are underway to expand digital lending services, enabling even more customers to access credit with minimal paperwork. LOLC is also working to enhance real-time analytics, using AI-powered insights to better understand customer needs, and explore new financial products such as insurance and investment solutions tailored for Cambodia’s microfinance market.

“With Temenos, we are not just keeping up with change—we are driving it. We are building the future of financial inclusion in Cambodia,” says Duleep.

By adopting Temenos Financial Inclusion, LOLC has positioned itself as a leader in inclusive banking, ensuring that more Cambodians—especially those in rural areas—have access to modern financial services. With improved customer experiences, faster onboarding, and a scalable platform for future growth, LOLC is setting new benchmarks in the microfinance industry.

That elevates its relationship with Temenos well beyond a client/vendor, explains Duleep. “Temenos is more than a technology provider; it is a partner in our mission to bring financial services to those who need them most and an indispensable part of our success story.”

ABN AMRO is one of the leading banks in the Netherlands with a significant international presence. With its roots going back 200 years, the Dutch financial services institution today provides banking services to millions of individuals and businesses, with a primary focus on the Netherlands and Northwest Europe. The bank is also a global leader in clearing.

The institution offers a range of products and services – including business loans, mortgages, savings, investment products, and payment services – across three divisions: personal and business banking, wealth management, and corporate banking.

Its strategy for growth is centered around three key pillars; customer experience, sustainability, and future-proof banking. These provide the foundation for bank’s mission to provide “Banking for better, for generations to come”, based on a fundamental vision of “becoming a personal bank in the digital age for the resourceful and ambitious”.

Strength in collaboration

ABN AMRO’s partnership with Temenos has been important to delivering on this vision. The journey with Temenos began almost two decades ago, when ABN AMRO started leveraging Temenos Wealth Front Office (previously ‘Triple A’) to update its legacy private banking environment. This collaboration has since expanded with Temenos core banking for its corporate and private banking business and continued further with the co-development of Temenos Payments Hub. The introduction of Temenos Continuous Deployment (TCD) running on the Temenos SaaS is the partnership’s most recent milestone.

Bas van As, ABN AMRO’s Head of International Core Banking, highlights that the benefit of this long-term partnership has been “to bring consistency and standardization to our technology stack and so make it easier to innovate and modernize.”

World class wealth management

Temenos Wealth Front Office, which is deployed in the Netherlands, France, Germany, and Belgium, has resulted in efficiency improvements to portfolio management, client reporting, and digital front-end tooling. The bank has also leveraged the sustainability insights made available from the solution to improve the guidance given by its relationship managers and advisors to clients.

Moreover, by using the same code base across its operations, the bank has been able to create multiple executions from a single development environment. It has been putting this capability to good use. Just recently, in Germany, the bank rolled out the Discretionary Portfolio Management (DPM) and advisory services.

Marnix Tummers, the bank’s IT Director of Wealth Management, explains that this single code base has also achieved efficiencies in other areas, such as lifecycle management, information security, and regulatory compliance. On the latter, he says: “Regulations and standards are forever evolving, within a jurisdiction and also between them. Temenos embeds these changes to its software, which empowers us to remain adaptable in fulfilling our compliance obligations in all our markets.” And on top of increased efficiency, scalability improves as well.

Composability at the core

Temenos Core provides a stable platform that runs across multiple business lines in multiple countries and markets, all from a single instance, which has become integral to the bank’s efficiency and performance goals. Initially, it was deployed in international corporate business and later in European corporate and private banking operations.

These advancements reflect ABN AMRO’s ongoing commitment to simplicity, or what Bas calls ‘hygiene’. “Our solutions need to be available, safe, and compliant. So, it remains incredibly important that we have a stable and reliable core banking system, because it also allows us to focus on managing our legacy technology effectively,” says Bas.

Marnix echoes those sentiments, pointing out that:

Adoption and integration of new capabilities is far easier, including access to third-party providers via the Temenos Exchange. In turn, it allows the bank to decouple outdated systems.

Cutting edge payments

Building on the success of the core modernization, ABN AMRO also looked to enhance its payments processing capabilities. The bank co-developed Temenos Payments together with Temenos as a centralized, global payments hub. Fully integrated with Temenos core banking, the solution enables real-time cross-border and domestic payments, supports various payment types, and processes complex transactions.

TPH continues to keep ABN AMRO at the forefront of the payments industry; it is a high-performing payment engine and contributing to a significant increase in volume capability. As Bas explains, “Especially in the payment area, among others, we have tried to leverage the product as much as we possibly can, and that has been truly beneficial.”

Engine for innovation

In its latest collaboration with Temenos, ABN AMRO has introduced Temenos Continuous Deployment (TCD) running on Temenos SaaS. Its DevOps teams use TCD to provision test environments, automate test cycles, and accelerate the delivery of innovative new client services.

They are now able to run overnight regression for all the functional areas, hitting a 100% pass rate with a single touch. “It’s an incredible achievement,” notes Bas.

Pioneering AI-Driven Banking Transformation

ABN AMRO views AI as a powerful force for transformation, unlocking new opportunities across its banking operations. According to Marnix “AI not just as a trend, but a foundational technology that can enhance efficiency, drive innovation, and open up new possibilities for customer engagement and operational excellence.” In partnership with Temenos, which is actively embedding AI capabilities into both its Core and Wealth platforms, ABN AMRO will be leveraging these advancements to future-proof its systems and stay ahead in a rapidly evolving financial landscape. This strategic alignment ensures that AI is not only integrated into their technology stack but also plays a key role in shaping the bank’s long-term vision for smarter, more adaptive banking.

People-led partnership

The story of ABN AMRO’s nearly two decades of partnership with Temenos has been one of transformation and growth. It has also been characterized by both technology and people. “We talk about technology being innovative, but that’s only achieved by innovative thinkers. People who think ahead and predict what we’re going to need. That ability to stay on top of things—be it technical innovations or regulations—is a really valuable aspect of our partnership with Temenos,” says Bas.

Established in 2005, Bank Albilad was the first bank in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia to offer Shari’ah-compliant products. The bank provides services to retail, corporate, and SME clients with a vision to be the preferred choice for innovative Islamic banking solutions. Operating in a rapidly changing sector, Bank Albilad is embracing innovation to shape Saudi Arabia’s future banking landscape. Its strategy is built on a culture of proactively leading, collaborating, and – through its dedicated innovation center – co-creating innovative solutions tailored to meet the needs of customers and stakeholders. This commitment to driving change has propelled its success: It was one of the first banks to establish an open banking platform and has aligned itself with Saudi Arabia’s Vision 2030 to create the best future for the country’s inhabitants.

Built on success

When it opened its doors back in 2005, Bank Albilad wanted to be at the forefront of Saudi Arabia’s digital transformation.

“There was a large proportion of people in the Kingdom with unmet banking needs,” says Ahmed AlZikan, Bank Albilad’s Chief Information Officer. “They were looking for Shari’ah-compliant products but couldn’t easily access a bank branch. We wanted to foster inclusivity and create a range of products that anyone in the country could access, no matter where they were located.”

To this end, the bank began looking for software that would enable it to establish a digital business from the outset. It sought a provider that would help it get up and running as quickly as possible and allow it to take Shari’ah compliant products to market easily.

Temenos emerged as the ideal partner.

Speed matters

Within just six months of selecting Temenos, Bank Albilad’s retail business was up and running. “It was incredibly fast,” Ahmed said. “We started with an earlier iteration of Temenos core banking and have since upgraded to a new version. We also added Temenos digital banking , which we believe has given us an edge in Islamic banking.”

Bank Albilad’s corporate arm is also built on Temenos Core. “All of the product configuration for our business banking happens within the Temenos solution,” Ahmed explains. “Even though access management is carried out in the platform itself – it is easy to establish a hierarchy of accounting authorization.”

Bank Albilad felt the benefits of leveraging Temenos core banking right away. “Everything is low-code,” Ahmed says. “IT can now build a product in three days. It takes far longer for our other teams to develop their products using Java or .NET, for example.”

The bank’s teams can then configure these products directly within the platform, accelerating product innovation. “The beauty of Temenos core banking is that our teams can configure products without actually talking to IT,” Ahmed explains.

This isn’t the only way that Temenos core banking is helping Bank Albilad to work quickly. It has also dramatically reduced close of business (COB) time.

A fast track for growth

These productivity benefits have scaled as Bank Albilad has diversified. “Temenos is helping us reduce the cost of IT and expedite our growth at the same time,” Ahmed says. “Today, all of the various subsidiaries within the bank are using Temenos. As we add more companies, we can get them onto the same system and have them up and running the next day. All it takes is a small configuration in accounting.”

These multiple companies leverage two data centers. “Because of our architecture, we have high availability,” Ahmed says. “We can switch from one data center to another in just a click, with zero issues and zero downtime.”

By operating so efficiently, Bank Albilad has grown from a three billion Saudi Arabian Riyal (SAR) business at its inception into the 17 billion SAR organization that it is today. In fact, today it is one of the top five banks in the country in terms of its product offerings across its corporate and retail businesses. Its commitment to digital is paying off, too: in 2023, it achieved a 14% year-on-year increase in mobile app users, with 71% of new retail customers joining digitally*.

A foundation for the future

Bank Albilad will continue to expand its use of Temenos solutions in the months and years to come. “We are aware that, to remain at the forefront of product innovation, we must continue to invest in our systems and processes,” Ahmed says. “That’s why we have renewed our contract with Temenos for 15 years.”

Overall, Ahmed wouldn’t hesitate to recommend Temenos to other banks like his: “In our opinion, it’s the easiest way to generate, deploy, and maintain products.”

Eurobank Group is a Greek banking group, based in Athens, Greece, with an international presence in Cyprus, Luxembourg, UK, and Bulgaria. It has 540 branches, around 10,500 employees, and total assets of $79.8bn. It is the 3rd largest bank in Greece and also in Cyprus, measured by assets, deposits, and loans. Its main strategic pillars are wealth asset management, international business banking, corporate investment banking, and bespoke banking for high-net worth individuals. These pillars vary from country to country.

Dual challenges, one solution

Chief among the bank’s challenges are regulation and digital innovation. On the former, an ever-changing, more demanding regulatory climate needs to be monitored and complied with. On the latter, the aim is to improve the customer experience by creating more self-service products and features, at a time when fintechs and neobanks are redefining customer-centric banking.

For Spyros Loizou, Group Head of International IT at Eurobank Cyprus, these are complimentary challenges. “Customers don’t just want convenience. They also need to feel that their funds, their investments, and their money, are safe and secure. So digital modernization is not just about how we create more convenient banking experiences, but also how we maintain responsible standards.”

Underpinning these dual challenges is technology, which the bank sees as both an enabler of innovation and a means to deliver its ESG commitments, explains Spyros. “Whatever we design and implement in the future has to be ESG compliant; but also, within the ESG spirit, meaning you design a process that has to be simple, and not burden the environment. That could mean going paperless with processes or minimizing the footprint of our IT operations. So we really approach ESG from a technology perspective.”

Time to change

Faced with these ambitions, Eurobank in Cyprus decided to evaluate its IT landscape. A closed architecture meant the bank relied heavily on the vendor to manage configurations and integrations, hampering innovation. This was compounded by the news that the vendor had stopped future investments in the product. “We were running legacy applications and systems that didn’t match the aspirations of the business. It wasn’t scalable, agile, flexible, or futureproof.”

That prompted the bank to search for a new core banking solution. From the outset, scale was an important selection criteria.

End-to-end advantage

Regulatory know-how was considered a key benefit of this scale. So too the breadth of the Temenos platform. “It has allowed us to continually enable new banking capabilities, without the complexities and costs from working with too many vendors.”

Eurobank Cyprus has made the most of this end-to-end platform, implementing core, digital, wealth management, Temenos Payments Hub (TPH), Financial Crime and Mitigation (FCM), trade finance, and analytics. The impact has been impressive, says Spyros. “Take TPH, for example. It has allowed us to simplify a previously complex operation of handling payments from different client types, whilst maintaining the flexibility to satisfy all the different nuances of each business line.”

Spyros also calls out the wealth management solution, from which the bank has launched a new digital offering.

This new digital wealth management service illustrates the speed with which Eurobank Cyprus can develop and launch new products. It has applied this capability across its portfolio, including investments, deposits, and lending products. “We can really go as fast as we want in a matter of days, we can launch a new product to the market, and be able to share with all our customer bases. That’s more than twice as fast as before.”

Big bang

Eurobank Cyprus has been live with the Temenos platform in its Cyprus business since April 2023; and for a “big bang implementation,” Spyros says it has been a smooth transition. “All the modules were new for all employees, but we’ve found them easy to learn and use. That empowers our people to create new products and proactively find new ways to do things more efficiently.”

The scope of the implementation – covering 85% of the bank’s IT in its Cyprus operation – felt like “waking up the next day with a brand new bank,” says Spyros. It was made more complex by starting three months prior to Covid and the workplace restrictions that ensued, which continued for 80% of the project.

Partnered by Temenos Implementation Services, the project involved not only migrating data from the old systems but also adapting the back-end procedures and operations so that they were aligned. This was a crucial aspect, recalls Spyros.

The big lesson he takes away from the implementation is the need for discipline, which points to having the right partner. “You need a lot of good governance. With a large-scale migration such as we did, it can be easy for the scope to creep even broader. It’s very important to stick to the plan, and only then allow yourself the appetite to add incrementally.”

First year returns

Just over a year after go-live, Eurobank Cyprus has already seen significant returns on its investment in Temenos. In payments it has been able to introduce STP (straight through processing), and now nine out of ten payments are fully automated, including compliance checks. Today it processes approximately 120,000 monthly payments in and out, across its product range, with the majority in their corporate, commercial, and international sectors. There has been good news too on false positives, which has come down to 6-8% as a result of the FCM module.

Spyros adds that it is also now much easier for the bank to implement new payment methods (e.g. SEPA and SWIFT) and configure these differently for its separate business lines and customer profiles, such as adjusting pricing rules and fee structures. “In combination with FCM, we can pretty much do whatever we want in order to balance operational efficiency, while ensuring compliance.”

Wealth management is another area where the bank has seen efficiencies. Prior to Temenos, every aspect – from order capture through to execution and settlement – was manual or semi-manual. STP has also been applied here, “which allows us to focus more on what really matters for the customer, such as providing good advice and investing in the manager relationship.”

Digital banking is a third area of improvement that Spyros calls out.

Eurobank Cyprus has also taken advantage of the trade finance module from Temenos. “It marries really well with our corporate business because a lot of our clients that are trading across the globe need to guarantee their shipments with letters of credit.” Again, automation has been a big benefit and applied to tasks such as calculating commissions, and managing messages across the SWIFT network. “It is another example of how we have taken fully manual processes and achieved significant efficiencies with automation.”

An ambitious future

Going forward, the bank’s priority is to grow its retail business. “With the Temenos platform, we have the capabilities we need to achieve this.” As well as scalability, composability of services, and automation, it includes availability. Since going live, the bank has seen 99.96% availability from the platform, which is even more impressive when you consider the ‘big bang’ approach it took. This robustness is complemented by a support team from Temenos that “are knowledgeable, proactive, and solve issues fast”, says Spyros.

And compliance automations make the bank better placed to manage the rollout of a new raft of upcoming international regulations and standards, such as the introduction of the Swift MX ISO format in 2025.

With the successful implementation in its Cyprus business serving as a blueprint, Eurobank Cyprus has since enabled Temenos Wealth in Greece, and is now implementing it in Luxembourg.

ASA International is one of the world’s largest international microfinance institutions. It provides small, socially responsible loans to low-income entrepreneurs, most of whom are women, across Asia and Africa. Headquartered in Amsterdam and Dhaka, it has 2.3 million clients across 13 countries and employs 13,400 people. It has an outstanding loan portfolio of $369.2 million.

For Rob Keijsers, the company’s Chief Digital and Information Officer, success is the ability to constantly adapt to uncertain markets. “We operate in countries that are more susceptible to geopolitical risks and where credit rules vary and change.” The goal, he says, is to bring stability to these markets by reducing the number of unbanked and underbanked people. “There’s a big market to win in the next couple of years.”

Bringing modern to the masses

To achieve that goal, ASA International has turned to Temenos, deploying its core banking platform across all markets. Along with an in-house built front-end app, the aim is “to give people at the bottom of the pyramid the same, modern phone banking experience that is typical in developed countries.”

Deployed first in Pakistan in February 2024, the Temenos core replaces a bespoke loan system that the business developed in-house 15 years ago. Rob explains that the upgrade to Temenos reflects the importance of having cutting-edge technology. “To achieve a world-class digital experience, you can’t simply put an API layer on top of an old system. We needed a modular, open-architecture system to run our API on top of.”

Part of the issue was scope. “Our loan management system was just that—it only did loans. We wanted a full-blown core banking system, so that we can offer bank-like services and experiences. Temenos core allows us to move into savings, payments, and micro-insurance. We couldn’t scale like that with our old system.”

To broaden the range of services it offers, ASA International needed a regulated banking license, for which a modern core banking platform is a prerequisite. The company has also deployed Temenos Financial Crime Mitigation to reassure regulators and clients alike of its maturing responsibility.

Country by country adaptability

The key to selecting Temenos was its Financial Inclusion platform.

Along with the modularity of the platform, it allows ASA International to easily switch-on new capabilities, on a country-by-country basis. Rob adds that this flexibility can also be applied to deployment. “We needed to take different hosting approaches for each market, in part because data sovereignty regulations vary. The underlying architecture of the platform meant we could choose cloud (Microsoft Azure) for some countries, and on-premises for others. That was a big driver for us.”

People-led implementation

Those not close to the implementation project may be forgiven for thinking it was a simple switchover; and that was the point, says Rob. “On the Friday we closed shop with our old system, and on the Monday morning we were live with Temenos, and it all worked perfectly.”

In truth, that switch-on was preceded by 12 months of hard work. Experience had taught Rob the challenge that comes with large-scale implementations, and the importance of preparation. “It’s like open-heart surgery whilst running a marathon! You’re doing all this work in the background, and having to keep your legacy system running.”

Rob points to the expertise and dedication of the Temenos team as key.

Rob recalls how, having dropped its implementation partner midway through the project, Temenos helped them source Systems, who proved to be more suitable. “It’s that sort of dedication and willingness to go above and beyond that defines our relationship with Temenos.”

He says that a big lesson from the implementation project is that IT transformations are more about managing business change than deploying new systems. “I’d say 70% of implementation should focus on user adoption. The technology requires a completely different mindset, a different way of working and redesigning new processes. That’s not always easy to do if your company has been used to working in a certain way for the last 15 years.” His advice for others is to invest in training. “Train, train, and train…and not only your IT operations people, but also all your business users. Make sure that everyone is trained up to the max.”

Bigger, better, faster

The rebooted implementation exercise, which included migrating 700,000 clients in Pakistan alone, is already reaping rewards.

Rob says another long-term benefit will be the ability to standardise products and processes across the business. “That means less waste, and more focus on driving efficiencies and raising standards, both in our operations and the customer experience.” As an example, he points to the alignment of Temenos core and the company’s in-house front-end app. “Immediately that enables straight through processing (STP) and so takes out a multitude of manual, cumbersome processes. In turn, it frees up commercial resources to focus on new business opportunities.”

Agility will be another benefit. “Now we don’t have to hard-code anything into the product suite, we can make simple improvements to our products fast. That’s a big change.”

Market making

Deployment now moves to Ghana, Tanzania and Kenya (all three will be running on the Azure Cloud), expecting the first country to be live in summer 2024 and the 2 others in 2025 and then to fully rollout the platform to all remaining 9 markets.

Launched in 2016 Zain Cash is a mobile wallet business licensed in Iraq, growing 150% Year-on-year.

The mobile wallet product supports both SMEs and consumers to have easy and convenient access to payment, such as collections and payroll services; money transfer services nationally and internationally as well as bill payment, with more than 10,000 agents across the country providing deposit and withdrawal services.

Zain Cash has rapidly expanded, achieving over 1.2 million app downloads.

Yazen Altimimi, CEO, Zain Cash, explains: “ZainCash attract customers with effortless onboarding and innovative and accessible payment solutions designed for everyday convenience.”

Zain Cash has a network of agents across Iraq, which could be a mobile phone shop, local store, or a gas station. Agents are both cash-in and cash-out locations as well as a registration location, which has the potential to improve and increase banking accessibility and ease.

Building a new future

Innovation for Zain Cash is about leveraging technologies to provide better customer experiences. This is in evidence in their product, which utilizes face ID and iris identification, incorporating AI to improve the customer experience and enhance security.

This appetite for innovation has become more important than ever. While Zain Cash’s only product is currently a mobile wallet, the organization’s vision and ambitions are expanding, with hopes to become a digital bank in the near future. That opportunity also presents a number of challenges. Iraq’s banking sector is very regulated and complex. It is also a very competitive industry. There are 70 banks in Iraq, and more standalone providers of wallets and payment solutions. Against this backdrop is an increasingly sophisticated consumer. Yazen explains: “Iraqis are not the consumer of five or ten years ago. They are now very tech-savvy, and mobile first. As a result, they’re expecting the same level of digital services they could find in more developed countries.”

To deliver this future, Zain Cash deployed Temenos core and Temenos Payments Hub (TPH) in March 2024 with Prema Consulting as the implementation partner. This transition included migrating data and balances from 700,000 wallets.

Yazen says: “In March, we relaunched all our tech stack, so the Temenos core banking platform connected to the middleware TIBCO. We were the first to perform this connection. It was a rebirth for Zain Cash.”

Another area Zain Cash wants to focus on innovating is compliance, risk, financial crime and management of AML all from within the Temenos platform.

Scaling ethically

Before moving to Temenos and TPH, Zain Cash had a mobile wallet solution, but did not feel it fulfilled their vision and plan for the future.

Scalability in terms of product development has been matched by the ability to onboard more customers. “With our legacy system, we were very limited in adding new customers. The more we added, the heavier the system became, which compromised performance. Now with Temenos we don’t have that friction. And because we can easily scale, we are able to push our marketing campaigns to drive new sign-ups and improve retention.”

For Zain Cash, growing at scale is also about growing sustainably. And according to Yazen, Temenos is helping them to achieve that too. “We wanted a system that is reliable and sustainable for the future. We have plans to focus on introducing lending products, and that’s something that Temenos does very well. Moving to Temenos means it’s very easy for us to introduce new products very quickly, whether for today or for five years from now.”

While growing at scale and at speed, Zain Cash has implemented ESG principles from the start, especially around its environmental impact.

Improving efficiency and reliability

Zain Cash has seen improvements in operational efficiency and reliability since making the move to Temenos, and positive customer feedback has given them more confidence to increase marketing and product development.

Yazen says: “When we launched with Temenos, we were impressed by the operational efficiency that we were able to unlock. We found that work was much more seamless and reliable. There has been no interruption to our daily payment volume of 100,000 transactions, onboarding customers is now faster, and the response times have improved by 50%. We’re also seeing great feedback from the consumers who use our product.”

According to Yazen, Zain Cash intends to keep the momentum going.

Improving efficiency and reliability

Zain Cash has seen improvements in operational efficiency and reliability since making the move to Temenos, and positive customer feedback has given them more confidence to increase marketing and product development.

Yazen says: “When we launched with Temenos, we were impressed by the operational efficiency that we were able to unlock. We found that work was much more seamless and reliable. There has been no interruption to our daily payment volume of 100,000 transactions, onboarding customers is now faster, and the response times have improved by 50%. We’re also seeing great feedback from the consumers who use our product.”

According to Yazen, Zain Cash intends to keep the momentum going.

Looking to the future

Yazen concludes: “Temenos is quicker, more reliable, scalable, agile, and empowers innovation. And there’s still a lot to learn. It’s just the beginning of our journey with this partnership. We depend a lot on Temenos already, and we’re keen to learn more about Temenos models and how we can leverage them in the future. We have big visions for the future and achieving it will only be possible with Temenos.”

“As a leader of Zain Cash for the past eight years, and as someone that has been operating in the financial service sector in Iraq, which is such a challenging market, I believe Temenos is the best product for anyone who has a vision to provide modern financial services, whether in Iraq, in the region, or across the world.”

We partnered successfully with Prema Consulting

Prema Consulting is a fast growing IT company with Temenos core banking functional and technical skilled consultants.

Learn more about Prema Consulting

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

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 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 to support the introduction of pan-European instant payments and consolidate all payment rail processing onto a single platform. Adding Temenos Payments 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 Core, 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.