Already one of the top banks in Libya, Assaray Trade and Investment Bank (ATIB) has ambitious plans to become the leading digital bank not only in its home market but across the whole North African region. To achieve this, ATIB focuses on delivering first-class services that win growing numbers of customers, while building streamlined internal operations to attract the very best banking talents.

Farouk K. Laabidi, General Manager, ATIB, explains: “10 years ago, ATIB primarily focused its efforts on the corporate market. However, with the ever-increasing demand for retail online and mobile banking services among consumers, especially in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic, the bank has strategically expanded its services into the retail banking space. Targeting these digitally-savvy customers is a key strategic goal for us.”

Setting the standard for innovation

Operating in Libya presents significant challenges for banks, as the country’s national infrastructure is currently in the process of development and its political situation has experienced some periods of unpredictability, which can present slowness to growth. Many banks have been unrushed to embrace digital technologies, with some not fully integrated to the national payment system and unable to accept all types of electronic transfers. But where other service providers see limitations, ATIB recognizes huge opportunities for building long-term success. ATIB believes that innovation is a matter of culture, it starts from the top, and all employees are encouraged to embrace it.

Farouk K. Laabidi continues: “We have focused on digital transformation since 2014, bringing many innovative services to market. For example, during the difficult times of cash shortages in the period of 2016–2019, we were one of the leading banks to launch reliable prepaid payment cards and offer an electronic wallet application that allows users to purchase goods via their mobile devices. As well as enhancing and developing new digital services, we are now excited by the possibilities of open banking.”

However, ATIB realized that its existing core and digital banking solutions were starting to restrict its ability to innovate. Building tailored services for different customer segments was a difficult, time-consuming process, and the bank did not have the modern API functionality to interface with third-party services. To sharpen its competitive edge, ATIB started to look for a more advanced, customer-centric solution.

Choosing a solution with extensive capabilities

Keen to overhaul and modernize many components of its banking infrastructure, ATIB looked for a partner with extensive knowledge and experience of large-scale transformation projects. The bank decided to deploy an integrated suite of core and digital banking solutions from Temenos including Temenos Analytics, and Temenos Payments.

Adopting a remote deployment model

Working with Temenos and Temenos business partner Prema Consulting, ATIB kicked off the implementation of the solutions, starting with Temenos core banking in a two-phase project that was completed in just ten months. To optimize performance and efficiency, the bank runs the core platform on the Microsoft Azure public cloud.

Dunia M. Ajaj, Head of PMO at ATIB, comments: “The implementation was complex, and we experienced huge disruption due to the COVID-19 pandemic. After one month we faced severe travel restrictions, but Temenos showed great flexibility by switching to a remote deployment strategy. Going live in ten months was a great result, with Temenos delivering excellent support to keep the project moving forward.”

Muawiya Abu Jubain, CEO, Prema-C, added “We believe that ATIB’s project is a strategic project for us, knowing the ambitions the bank management and employees have in deploying the world renowned Temenos core banking system. And we wanted to be part of this exciting journey that brings growth and innovation to ATIB. Despite the pandemic, we managed to reach the bank’s goal of going live in a record time of ten months. This could have never been achieved without the dedication of ATIB’s team, Prema consultants, and the Temenos project management team and consultants.”

Transforming the customer experience

Using Temenos core banking, ATIB enhanced many of its customer services. For example, the bank used the rich integration functionality of the Temenos solution to deliver greater flexibility to customers using its prepaid payment cards. Whenever users need to top up their card with funds from their electronic wallet or account, they can now manage the process quickly and easily via their mobile device.

Using Temenos Analytics, ATIB adopted a more customer-centric approach to development, as Farouk K. Laabidi explains: “With our old core platform, we could not gain a detailed picture of customer behavior. Using Temenos Analytics, we analyze their preferences and requirements in depth, and build more relevant, personalized offerings closely aligned with their financial needs and lifestyles.”

Breaking new ground in the Libyan market

Since then, ATIB has worked with Prema Consulting to implement Temenos digital banking platform – becoming the first bank in North Africa to harness the cutting-edge capabilities of the solution. The bank went live on an on-premises instance of the solution in a phased deployment process, with the business partner helping to integrate the platform with Temenos core banking and a series of third-party solutions.

ATIB has used Temenos to develop and launch a brand new feature-rich digital banking service for retail and corporate clients: ATIB Online. Accessible web and mobile app, that allows users to manage their accounts, monitor transactions, top up local and international payment cards in various currencies, and purchase mobile phone vouchers thanks to integrations with several network operators and internet service providers.

In another breakthrough move, ATIB recently added transferring funds between two bank accounts within Libya, as Farouk K Laabidi explains: “We added an integration with the national payment system to allow users to transfer money online or via their mobile. This represents a first-of-a-kind service for the Libyan market, so once again we are leading the way in terms of innovation.”

Offering customers the speed and convenience of transacting online without having to head to a bank branch has had a hugely positive impact on satisfaction levels. And ATIB Bank plans to add more products and services to the digital application, as Farouk K Laabidi notes: “We are around 60 percent of the way towards reaching our digitalization objectives. We are planning to use Temenos digital banking to create online loan origination and onboarding workflows in 2024, and we will also implement Temenos Payments Hub.”

Reaching new customers

The partnership with Temenos is helping ATIB to achieve its goal of increasing market share and becoming one of the banking leaders in Libya and beyond. The enhanced portfolio of products and services has contributed to a 40 percent boost in customer volumes, and the bank has grown its assets under management by 40 percent since partnering with Temenos. In particular, during the first three months of offering ATIB Online, the platform gained 5,000 new users—and is now aiming to onboard 20,000 by the end of 2023, and 100,000 by the end of 2026.

A Step Ahead of the Competition

Within ATIB, the Temenos solutions have had a significant impact on workflow efficiency. Higher levels of automation removed the need for manual interventions during many key processes, enabling employees to work more productively and reducing overall costs. Furthermore, this focus on efficiency has helped ATIB reduce its cost-to-income by up to 15 percent, and to achieve a strong return on equity of between 15 and 17 percent.

ATIB also believes that deploying a modern, world-leading suite of banking solutions will help to attract the brightest bankers in Libya.

As the Libyan banking market becomes more digitalized and embraces Open Banking, ATIB is in prime position to take full advantage, as Abdulmohaimen M. Matoug explains: “The Temenos solutions will enable us to integrate with many different partners, not only among financial services providers but also airlines and utilities companies to provide customers with more convenient payment methods.”

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

We partnered successfully with Microsoft

Microsoft’s Financial Services group helps financial firms leverage technology to amplify the impact their people can deliver to drive business success.

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In a crowded marketplace, you need to think outside the box and offer something unique to succeed. That’s the challenge for Bank SinoPac operating in Taiwan, one of the most oversaturated banking markets in the Asia Pacific region. Part of Taiwanese finance group SinoPac Holdings, the bank serves individual and corporate clients and also operates in China, Hong Kong, Macao, Vietnam, and the United States.

Irene Huang, Chief Digital Officer, Bank SinoPac, explains: “We are competing against 38 commercial banks for a slice of a limited market. But there are opportunities, too. For example, there is high demand for digital and mobile banking services among younger people, especially those we call High Earners, Not Rich Yet or HENRYs, who form an important target demographic.”

One key component in Bank SinoPac’s strategy is a focus on digital innovation, as Irene Huang adds: “On the one hand, it’s about embedding new technologies, such as open APIs and artificial intelligence (AI). But it’s also about the right mindset, and always thinking of the customer experience when designing products. While many Taiwanese banks are conservative in their thinking, we adopt a more innovative approach.”

Taking the first steps on the transformation journey

This strategy dates back as far as 2009, when Bank SinoPac began to transform its core banking environment. To replace inflexible legacy systems, the bank selected Temenos core banking. They migrated previously data related to three million customers onto the platform. The move led to major efficiency gains: close of business (COB) processes ran 70 percent faster, and infrastructure costs were cut in half.

Entering the era of open banking

Since then, Bank SinoPac has worked with Temenos to upgrade the core platform in 2012 and 2020. The latest upgrade provided access to advanced API integration functionality, which enabled the bank to take advantage of the open finance initiative launched in Taiwan in 2020. The bank uses the open APIs to interface with the systems of 12 partner organizations and SinoPac Holdings subsidiaries.

For the internal teams at Bank SinoPac, Temenos solution has proved easy to use, as Irene Huang confirms: “Temenos core banking is a very intuitive platform. For example, the preconfigured components simplify work such as product development, eliminating the need for us to write lines of code.”

Developing a first-of-a-kind mobile banking app

Using Temenos core banking has enabled Bank SinoPac to push ahead with its innovation strategy. For example, the latest upgrade helped the bank achieve a threefold improvement in time to market for new services. The solution also helped the bank kick off the development of new digital banking services, such as the groundbreaking DAWHO app, which stands for Digital Account with Happiness and Opulence.

Irene Huang explains: “In Taiwan, banks typically offer mobile apps to manage only one service, such as savings or payments, causing a fragmented experience when users want to complete several different transactions. With DAWHO, we aimed for an ‘ecosystem’ approach that would offer customers a frictionless digital journey and enable them to access multiple services through one portal.”

In a first for the Taiwanese market, DAWHO integrates seven services: deposits, wealth management, foreign exchange, personal loans, mortgages, credit cards, and securities—all provided by Bank SinoPac or a SinoPac Holdings subsidiary. Temenos core banking processes all customer transactions made through the DAWHO app and enables the bank to create and deploy new product features.

Attracting an extra million customers

The DAWHO app has been a huge success, giving Bank SinoPac a valuable differentiator in the Taiwanese market. User feedback has been extremely positive, with satisfaction scores of 4.9 out of five on the Apple App Store. And in just over three years since the launch of DAWHO, the bank has seen 1.5 million customers open digital accounts—including 78 percent, or 1.17 million, net-new clients.

The app has helped Bank SinoPac to reach younger market segments, as Irene Huang notes: “Before the launch of DAWHO, the average age of our retail banking customers was 47. Today, it is 33—indicating that we have increased our appeal to generations Y and Z, including the HENRYs.”

This surge in customer numbers translates into a much bigger slice of the Taiwanese market. “We are now ranked number four in Taiwan in terms of digital banking account holders,” explains Irene Huang. “And overall, we have grown our market share from around five to ten percent since the rollout of DAWHO.”

Refining the digital experience

In the latest collaboration, Bank SinoPac is using Temenos digital banking to reshape and unify the user experience across all its digital delivery channels—including its e-banking web portal and mobile app, DACARD payments app, and integrated DAWHO app. The project is progressing well, and the bank expects to complete the enhancements and launch the new digital ecosystem early in 2024.

Irene Huang adds: “Our design team finds Temenos digital banking very useful for developing new layouts for our digital portals. They also highlight the value of Temenos Visualizer, which gives them the tools to create a consistent look and feel for all of our apps. Once live, we will be able to roll out updates to all four digital portals at once through Temenos digital banking, rather than having to run them separately.”

Established in 1996, Bank of Abyssinia is currently the largest privately held bank in Ethiopia, and plans to become the leading commercial bank in East Africa by 2030. To reach this milestone, the bank is on a mission to grow its customer base, boosting financial inclusion in the country and beyond.

Helping more Ethiopians access banking services

According to the National Bank of Ethiopia, 75 percent of Ethiopians don’t have a bank account and up to 40 percent of all bank branches in the country are located near to the capital. For many years, banks have struggled to expand their reach beyond urban centers as setting up and running branches in rural locations involves significant upfront capital expenditure and high operational costs.

However, market conditions are rapidly changing in Ethiopia, as more people gain regular and reliable access to the internet. Bank of Abyssinia identified an opportunity to help more people access financial services by building a 100 percent digital banking offering.

Addis Tadesse, Director for Application Management at Bank of Abyssinia, explains: “We’ve offered digital banking services for many years, but most of these services still required our customers to visit a branch at some stage – for instance, to bring identification to open new accounts. Also, some processes such as loan applications required in-person consultations. If we could make the experience completely digital, we would be able to reach underserved communities in remote areas and dramatically increase our market share.”

With no other bank in Ethiopia offering a fully digital service, Bank of Abyssinia decided to pioneer the new approach and searched for a technology partner to support its initiative. Crucially, the bank targeted a solution provider that would help it deliver a truly seamless digital experience and ensure that it could meet strict regulatory requirements for new digital banks set by the National Bank of Ethiopia.

Finding the perfect solution

Bank of Abyssinia decided to build 100 percent digital banking services with Temenos. At the same time, the bank chose to upgrade its Temenos core banking system to ensure that it could provide customers with the very latest innovations in both digital and in-branch banking.

Protecting against fraud

As the first bank in Ethiopia to launch entirely digital services, Bank of Abyssinia knew its new platform would be a potential target for fraudsters and cyber criminals. To safeguard against this risk, Bank of Abyssinia also decided to implement Temenos Financial Crime Mitigation—equipping the bank with the tools to spot and prevent illicit activity in near real-time.

Deepening partnerships

To achieve a rapid implementation, Bank of Abyssinia enlisted the support of Temenos business partner Xpert Digital to deploy Temenos digital banking, including the setup of an API integration with Idemia—the bank’s identity and security solution. Supported by Temenos and Xpert Digital, Temenos digital banking went live in just four months.

“Xpert Digital played a lead role in helping us design a digital banking ecosystem that is secure, reliable and, crucially, easy to use,” comments Addis Tadesse. “The Xpert Digital team went the extra mile by helping us to redesign key workflows for a completely digital environment incorporating best practices. For instance, they helped us to leverage integrations with Idemia to build efficient, highly secure and automated verification processes—allowing us to onboard customers rapidly and with confidence.”

Welcoming new digital customers

By building and launching end-to-end digital banking services with Temenos core and digital banking platforms, Bank of Abyssinia has significantly increased its customer base.

“Temenos gives us the tools we need to offer reliable, convenient and always-on digital banking services,” explains Addis Tadesse. “Today, through our Apollo service, customers can sign up for an account from their mobiles by submitting a video of themselves and a copy of their national identity card. With Temenos Financial Crime Mitigation and Idemia, we can run verification processes quickly and get new customers up and running with their new bank account within one day.”

Empowering more people to invest in their future

As well as offering digital account management services, Bank of Abyssinia enables customers to apply for loans via its mobile banking app—helping more people to access credit, as Addis Tadesse adds: “With Temenos digital banking, we can approve the loan and give our customer to their funds within a few seconds, as long as they meet our lending criteria, where previously this would take months.”

He concludes: “With Temenos, we’ve been able to bring a game-changing solution to the Ethiopian banking sector and empower our customers to bank with us confidently at any time and from any location. We look forward to strengthening our partnership with Temenos in the years ahead as we continue to develop our digital banking offerings and help more customers manage their money effectively.”

We partnered successfully with Xpert Digital

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

Learn more about Xpert Digital

With offices in Sydney and Brisbane, Alex Bank is a 100 percent digital challenger bank, committed to providing customers in Australia with faster, fairer, and more flexible financial solutions. Alex Bank serves individuals and small businesses across the country with a range of retail and commercial banking products.

Simon Beitz, CEO of Alex Bank, takes up the story: “Our domestic market is dominated by four banks with a combined market share of around 85 percent. We surveyed 2,500 prospective customers about their frustrations with their current banks. We found that one of the biggest pain points was slow service. With legacy banks, applications for savings accounts, loans, and mortgages can often take several weeks to complete. We saw an opportunity to shape higher-quality retail and commercial banking experiences by removing the friction from these journeys.”

Targeting the optimal core banking platform

As a newly authorized deposit-taking institution (ADI) licensed by the Australian Prudential Regulatory Authority (APRA), Alex Bank looked for the optimal technology stack to help it deliver outstanding customer experiences. Compliant, always-on digital services were a must, and the bank targeted a core banking platform that could support its long-term goals.

Building a platform for service innovation

To lay the foundation for next-generation services, Alex Bank selected Temenos core banking on Temenos SaaS, deployed on a resilient and highly available platform.

“We evaluated potential vendors against several criteria, including industry experience, access to support, and a proven track record of successful deployments,” recalls Beitz. “Temenos met all our operational and technical requirements for a new core banking platform. As well as having global reach, Temenos has a very strong footprint in Australia, which gave us the confidence we could get effective support whenever we needed it. Temenos core banking can be customized flexibly and deployed rapidly, which allows us to address stringent regulatory requirements without sacrificing our challenger bank agility.”

Accelerating deployment, reducing costs

By deploying Temenos core banking on SaaS, Alex Bank accelerated its core banking implementation while avoiding the significant capital and operational costs associated with deploying an on-premises infrastructure.

Beitz elaborates: “Temenos SaaS offers us many advantages over an on-premises approach. With managed services from Temenos, we are free from the burden of maintaining our infrastructure, which empowers staff to add value in other areas of the business. We can also scale Temenos core banking quickly and easily as we grow—a big advantage for a challenger bank. Crucially, Temenos SaaS offers us mature security and high availability capabilities, giving us the peace of mind that our organization and our customers are always protected.”

Unlocking vital insights

Working with an expert team from Temenos, Alex Bank leveraged the solution’s built-in tools to tailor its banking products to meet the needs and expectations of its target market, and to design Temenos Analytics reports to deliver business insights to management and leadership teams.

 “We can modify business rules in Temenos Financial Crime Mitigation with minimal support from Temenos, saving time and effort and helping us to keep pace with the needs of the business.”

Rocketing ahead in the Australian market

Through its collaboration with Temenos, Alex Bank is rapidly establishing itself as one of Australia’s fastest-growing financial organizations.

“Our goal isn’t simply to offer slightly faster services than our banking competitors,” explains Beitz. “We want to deliver experiences that match the speed and convenience of our customers’ favorite brands — for example, e-commerce retailers. To realize our vision, we’ve designed every stage of every journey with the customer experience at the center.”

Providing decisions in seconds

By combining the capabilities of Temenos core banking with its own AI technologies, the bank is delivering lending decisions and onboarding customers within minutes, speeding ahead of its competitors.

“We have created a smart, real-time credit decisioning system called Alex Intelligence™, which uses data analytics to accurately assess an applicant’s credit risk,” explains Beitz. “For unsecured loans, we’ve compressed the entire customer application process down to two minutes and 40 seconds. When a customer applies via their digital device, we can give them a decision significantly faster than our competitors and deposit the money to their account within as little as three hours. We’ve since expanded to secured personal loans, and next we plan to build a similar offering for small business owners.”

Nurturing customer loyalty

Alex Bank’s relentless focus on the customer experience is already paying dividends. The organization is racing ahead of its competitors with a Trustpilot TrustScore of 4.8/5, far exceeding the banking category average of 3.4/5.

“We are now measuring a satisfaction score of 81.7/100 on Trustpilot, which shows that our approach is really resonating with our customers,” says Beitz. “Our growth trajectory is so steep that we’re often breaking our own daily records for new lending and deposits. Since ADI issued in 21DEC22, deposits have increased by 2100 percent and lending has grown by 66 percent. These results contributed to Alex Bank receiving Fast Starter awards from both Deloitte and the Australian Financial Review.”

Planning for the future

Looking ahead, Alex Bank plans to work with Temenos to bring its mortgage offering for small business owners to market, and the bank expects to achieve profitable operations within a matter of months.

One of MENA’s leading international banks, Bank ABC will replace its legacy core banking systems for its network of operations serving customers in twenty-five markets from fifteen countries worldwide with a single instance of the Temenos platform. Temenos and Systems will replace its core banking systems for its retail, corporate and wholesale businesses and furthermore power its subsidiary, ila Bank, the MENA region’s fast-growing digital mobile-only bank. Consolidating multiple back-end systems on the Temenos platform in the Cloud will enable Bank ABC to drive scalable efficiency, with a single dashboard and complete 360-degree customer view across business lines and geographies.

The first phase of the project is the implementation of Temenos retail core banking solution and origination on digital banking for ila Bank. Subsequently, Bank ABC will leverage Temenos’ cloud-native solutions and its open and API-first architecture for easy extensibility and open banking integration to enhance the experience and the services delivered to its customers. The project will see the gradual transformation of the Group-wide core banking infrastructure, enabling Bank ABC to benefit from Temenos’ broad set of banking functionality and lower operational cost across its retail and wholesale banking operations.

We partnered successfully with Systems Limited

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

Learn more about Systems Limited

Baiduri Bank is one of the largest providers of financial products and services in Brunei, and serves diverse customer segments ranging from retail, MSMEs to corporate and institutional clients. The Bank offers a comprehensive suite of digital solutions including an award-winning mobile banking app and dedicated business digital banking service. The bank will adopt Temenos banking services for core banking, data analytics and financial crime mitigation (FCM) to support its retail and corporate banking, finance and wealth management operations. With this move, Baiduri Bank will be the first bank in Brunei to operate its core banking platform in the cloud under the SaaS model.

Replacing legacy systems with Temenos modern SaaS on Microsoft Azure will enable Baiduri Bank to offer superior customer propositions with personalized offerings at a fraction of the time and cost. The move to Temenos Banking Cloud will commence in 2023, led by Temenos implementation partner Tech Mahindra. Temenos Banking Cloud allows Baiduri Bank to progressively renovate its IT landscape using a composable banking approach to deploy new services faster, more cost-effectively, and at scale.

Allied Irish Banks (AIB) is the Ireland’s largest bank and is critical to the growth of the country. The bank offers retail, business and corporate banking and aims to deliver a more resilient platform to provide much richer lending capabilities in a more digital fashion to its customers. This is why AIB defined a core strategy to tackle its core modernization. The bank decided to replace its complex, slow, and costly legacy core banking applications with Temenos core banking platform. The goal of the program is to consolidate multiple legacy core banking systems onto one market-leading platform surrounded by an API-driven architecture.

Pat O’Sullivan, CIO Business Platforms explains: “With Temenos, Allied Irish Banks is working to streamline business credit onto a single platform to deliver a modern, flexible solution that will provide business credit capabilities to all AIB’s customers. With Temenos, we are consolidating disparate systems, and removing complex, manual processes, which in turn reduces cost, and it enables us to rapidly respond to our customer demands and enhance our service. This is one of the most fundamentally important and strategic programs underway at AIB and is at the center of our ambition to transform the bank.”

AIB chose Temenos because of the referenceability of its core banking in the marketplace, the functionality, and the very rich and very flexible product capability that would work to bridge any gaps. The first phase of the 4 years modernization project is related to the business and corporate accounting. AIB went live with Release One for Bilateral Loans 11 months after signing. AIB current focus is on SME lending and delivering a very rich end-to-end digital product for their customer. In 2024 and 2025, AIB will be more involved in corporate syndication to deliver rich financial capabilities to its customers with the support of Temenos.

At a Glance

• Facilitates the creation and launch of the first fully digital bank in Trinidad & Tobago
• Enables the management of three separate banking entities on a single instance of Temenos Core Banking
• Simplifies the development of new services for different markets with a flexible, modular architecture
• Elastic scalability and exceptional cloud performance will help to support rapid customer growth

For more than 40 years, ANSA Merchant Bank has played an important role in the economic development of the Caribbean. Headquartered in Trinidad and Tobago, the bank provides financing, investment, and wealth management solutions to individuals, businesses and government bodies, locally and regionally.

Since its establishment, ANSA Merchant Bank has focused almost exclusively on commercial loans and project finance. But now, it’s making moves into retail banking, with the acquisition of Bank of Baroda, rebranded as ANSA Bank in early 2021. ANSA Bank will be a new type of bank in Trinidad and Tobago, focused on offering customer-centric digital services rather than serving clients via traditional bricks-and-mortar branches.

A spokesperson at the bank explains: “We set a high bar for ourselves with ANSA Bank, as we are looking to create the very first fully integrated digital bank in Trinidad and Tobago. Our vision is to widen the services available to individuals and businesses in the local market. We want to offer something that will improve the lifestyles of our customers and help them reach their financial dreams.”

Modernizing the core environment

To achieve its growth plans in the retail and business banking spaces, ANSA Merchant Bank needs a technology foundation that is agile, flexible, and scalable. Traditionally, the bank relied on a homegrown core system to support its client services, but this was increasingly difficult and costly to operate. Managing the system, for example, soaked up many hours and relied on the availability of experienced in-house teams.

To reduce risk and complexity, ANSA Merchant Bank planned to modernize the core environment, moving away from the homegrown system and onto a proven, best-of-breed platform with full vendor support. By adopting a more modern, streamlined core solution, the bank aimed to improve internal efficiency and support the delivery of more differentiated services across all entities and business lines.

Finding the right solution

After assessing potential vendors, ANSA Merchant Bank selected Temenos as its new core banking platform. The Temenos solution would allow the bank to access a rich ecosystem of functionality to support the development and delivery of retail and business banking, and wealth management services. ANSA Merchant Bank decided to run Temenos core banking on the Temenos banking cloud.

a spokesperson at the bank explains: “We knew that Temenos was a market leader for core banking solutions, with real expertise. When we engaged Temenos, we were immediately impressed with their communications and commitment to our success. And their robust, scalable solution was also just what we needed. The focus Temenos has on building new capabilities for its clients was another major plus-point.”

Setting up fast in the cloud

Working closely with expert service delivery teams from Temenos, ANSA Merchant Bank successfully implemented Temenos core banking running on the Temenos banking cloud on Microsoft Azure. By opting to deploy the core banking platform using the software-as-as-service (SaaS) model, the bank was able to speed the implementation process and enable fast access to key banking services for its users.

ANSA Merchant Bank enjoys a very successful working relationship with Temenos, as spokesperson at the bank confirms: “We are building a really strong partnership with Temenos. We enjoy great communications, especially with their cloud team, who we speak with three times every week. Whenever we have questions about functionality or need support, Temenos are always quick to respond with a resolution.”

Bringing a new digital model to market

Today, ANSA Merchant Bank uses Temenos core banking running on the Temenos banking cloud as the agile, modern core platform behind its retail banking, investment and wealth management services. Thanks to the multi-company architecture of Temenos, the bank can run all of its entities on a single instance of the core platform—helping to minimize costs and complexity, and improving operational efficiency.

A spokesperson at the bank continues: “We have well-established merchant banking operations in Trinidad and Tobago and Barbados, as well as our new retail banking arm. Within Temenos core banking, we have set up a separate, tailored environment dedicated to each of our operations, with all the tools we need for supporting clients and product development. With Temenos, it is easy for us to roll out services tailored to our target markets.”

The flexibility of Temenos core banking proved a crucial component in the successful acquisition and development of digital-first ANSA Bank, as spokesperson at the bank adds: “Following the acquisition of Baroda Bank, we migrated their core environment onto Temenos, avoiding the cost and hassle of purchasing a new system. Once this process was complete, we could start to build innovative digital banking services.”

Supporting long-term growth

With Temenos core banking running on the Temenos banking cloud, ANSA Merchant Bank has a powerful combination of elastic scalability, agility, and leading-edge product development functionality. The Temenos solutions provide a strong foundation for the bank to drive innovation in its range of products and services, and to achieve long-term growth in its customer base in Trinidad and Tobago, Barbados, and beyond.

Reaping the benefits of the cloud

In addition, adopting the Temenos banking cloud has enabled ANSA Merchant Bank to reduce costs and operational risk. The bank no longer has to maintain physical infrastructure, or worry about running critical management processes such as backups and upgrades. Furthermore, the enhanced security of the Temenos SaaS model keeps the bank well-protected against the threat of cyberattacks.

A spokesperson at the bank continues: “The Temenos banking cloud has been very stable, and the performance has been phenomenal—even as our database has grown at a rapid rate. We have enjoyed exceptional uptime rates, and have the option to add extra processor capacity whenever required. Throughout ANSA Merchant Bank, there is real confidence in the robustness of Temenos core banking and the Temenos banking cloud.”

We partnered successfully with Microsoft

Microsoft’s Financial Services group helps financial firms leverage technology to amplify the impact their people can deliver to drive business success.

Learn more about Microsoft

At a Glance

•  Cuts customer onboarding times by 75%, down from 2 hours to under 30 minutes

• Helps rural and community banks to increase financial inclusion with user-friendly mobile banking

• Ensures client banks meet compliance objectives with real-time transaction monitoring

Founded in 2000, ARB Apex Bank PLC operates as a ‘mini’ central bank for almost 150 rural and community banks located across Ghana. Managing over GH₵ 7 billion in total assets, ARB Apex Bank supports more than half of the banking sector in the African country, providing digital banking, cheque processing, remittance, and correspondent banking services, as well as issuing government securities.

A spokesperson at the bank comments: “Our core mission is to help rural and community banks improve financial inclusion throughout Ghana. We aim to achieve this by delivering a range of centralized banking services to these institutions, which enable them to offer convenient, user-friendly banking products to their customers in a highly secure, regulated way.”

Listen to Michael Appiah, Head of Operations at ARB Apex talking about how ARB Apex Bank partnered with Temenos to modernize core banking and drive financial inclusion across Ghana’s rural communities.

Improving financial inclusion

Estimates from the Bank of Ghana indicate that 7.3 million adults in the country do not have bank accounts*. The national government is working to reverse this by prioritizing financial inclusion initiatives through the establishment of rural and community banks across the country. But to reach as many citizens as possible, these institutions rely on support from larger banks. And this is where ARB Apex Bank PLC aims to make a difference.

A spokesperson at the bank explains: “Rural and community banks are typically located far from cities and financial centers, so often struggle to access high-performance, dependable banking infrastructure. For example, some rely on siloed legacy systems and manual processes, which limits their ability to develop and offer innovative services and stay up to date with national compliance rules.”

Crucially, many rural and community banks lacked the ability to monitor customer transactions in real-time—generating significant risk. With new regulations in Ghana set to come into force requiring real-time transaction screening, the bank set out to help.

ARB Apex Bank PLC planned to offer a new set of services that would help the smaller banks keep pace with the regulatory change. Alongside this, the bank aimed to provide enhanced core banking functionality to client banks, along with the capabilities for them to launch digital banking services to reach a wider range of citizens.

Taking a centralized approach

To deliver the new suite of core banking, digital banking, and fraud prevention solutions to rural and community banks, ARB Apex Bank PLC teamed up with Temenos. The bank decided to build a centralized banking platform powered by Temenos core banking with Financial Inclusion capabilities, Temenos Digital Banking Platform, and Temenos Financial Crime Management (FCM).

Today, ARB Apex Bank uses Temenos Solutions to support 147 rural and community banks, which have a combined total of 850 branches. ARB Apex Bank delivers core and digital banking services to these client banks through its secure private cloud environment based in Accra as one of the largest data centers in Ghana. Rural and community banks connect via radio, VSAT, and fibre networks to send and receive transactions in real-time. ARB Apex Bank PLC also leverages Temenos FCM to help its clients monitor transactions as they happen.

A spokesperson at the bank adds: “Temenos and its delivery partners Inlaks and TextGenesis were very helpful throughout the implementation, from installing and configuring our core banking solution to deploying the mobile and online banking tools. If we ever encounter an issue, Temenos are always on hand to provide a fast resolution. They’ve even gone the extra mile to help ensure that we satisfy the unique regulatory requirements of the Ghanaian banking sector.”

Driving digital innovation

Using Temenos Digital Banking Platform, ARB Apex Bank PLC is enabling rural and community banks to offer convenient, secure, and reliable mobile banking that makes it easy for their end customers to access vital financial services.

“We’re proud of the many innovations we’ve made with Temenos Digital Banking Platform,” says a spokesperson at the bank. “For instance, we’ve made it possible for customers of rural and community banks to use mobile banking services, which means they no longer have to spend time traveling to a branch to send and receive payments. Similarly, we are working with social enterprises to create a field collection service that enables small business owners to deposit money with approved agents in community hubs like markets.”

Since rolling out the Temenos solutions, ARB Apex Bank PLC has seen significant growth in customer deposits among its client banks. Mobile and digital banking has proved especially popular among traditionally unbanked communities. As of December 2021, ARB Apex Bank is managing the equivalent of USD $900 million in deposits, and the bank expects this figure to rise as more customers sign up with client banks.

Enhancing regulatory compliance

The Temenos solutions have also helped ARB Apex Bank PLC to enhance regulatory compliance and financial crime monitoring in the rural and community banking sector.

“Temenos FCM has been a real game-changer for us,” explains the spokesperson at the bank. “It enables us to send and monitor high volumes of transactions in real time while using up minimal network bandwidth. With Temenos FCM, we can maintain a high level of transparency into transactions to prevent fraud and other illegal activity, and ensure that smaller rural and community banks comply with stringent national regulations.”

Looking ahead, ARB Apex Bank PLC is exploring the possibility of moving its suite of Temenos solutions into the Temenos Banking Cloud—a move that will help to reduce operational IT costs and increase agility.

We partnered successfully with Inlaks

Learn more about Inlaks

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.

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.

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.