Vietnam Prosperity Joint Stock Commercial Bank (VPBank) is one of Vietnam’s largest private banks, serving over 30 million customers across retail and corporate banking. The bank is a leader in digital innovation, having launched multiple digital brands including NEO, NEOBiz, UBank, Cake. To serve millions more customers with speed and reliability, VPBank recognized that its core banking platform had to evolve – to be faster, smarter, and more scalable.

VPBank had been using Temenos Core Banking since 2006. As it has grown, it has retained this core, while upgrading to new releases.

“We always need to improve our speed to market and agility,” said Augustine Wong Kok Seng, former CIO at VPBank. “Digital banks move fast, and if we want to stay competitive, we need to keep our core platform at the cutting edge.”

More importantly, many of the alternative platforms required specialized business analyst skills that were hard to source in emerging markets like Vietnam.

VPBank committed to upgrading its Temenos core banking, while shifting to a hybrid architecture using Red Hat OpenShift. The bank partnered with Systems Limited, with proven expertise in deploying Red Hat OpenShift for core banking on-premise. Red Hat was instrumental in helping containerise VPBank’s core banking system. While the core continues to run on-premise in a private cloud, AWS supported the broader hybrid architecture and testing environments, providing flexibility as the bank plans for future innovations.

This wasn’t a routine upgrade. It was one of the largest and most complex core banking transformations in the country. It involved migrating more than 18 million accounts and 77 terabytes of data, all within a 24-hour go-live window.

Key to success was VPBank’s decision to run the upgrade using disaster recovery (DR) mode to avoid impacting customer service. For most of the weekend, customers continued transacting as usual, with only a brief three-hour switchover window when systems were unavailable.

“With this modernisation, VPBank gains the ability to orchestrate workloads at scale, streamline deployments, and maintain high availability. These are critical capabilities for supporting millions of customers while driving continuous innovation,” said Dao Hoang Giang (Jane), Country Manager, Red Hat Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos & Myanmar.

The technology upgrade is about more than just scale. It’s also enabling inclusion.

Vietnam has a population of over 100 million, but only around 30 million are currently banked. VPBank is on a mission to change that. “Our full name – Vietnam Prosperity Bank – says it all,” Augustine said. “We’re here to build an inclusive financial society. That requires trust, and trust is built on stable, scalable systems.”

When FundBank continued its recent global expansion into the US and Luxembourg, to further serve the asset management industry, it had a rare advantage: no legacy systems and no outdated technology. The goal was simple but powerful: create a fully digital, cross-border bank that could serve clients with speed, security, and simplicity. With the full Temenos SaaS offering FundBank turned that vision into reality driving its expansion in the United States. This foundation positions the bank to serve significantly more clients without increasing operational complexity.

FundBank isn’t a traditional bank. It is a global bank focused on serving the asset management sector, including fund managers, administrators, brokers, and family offices who need seamless service across jurisdictions. These clients value efficiency and expect their banking to move as fast as their investments. Using Temenos, FundBank is expected to serve significantly more customers per employee as automation and straight-through processing increase across operations.

“FundBank was built for a niche market that demands more than just banking,” said Diarmuid O’Donovan, Global Chief Information Officer. “They want a digital experience that feels effortless, wherever they do business.”

Having operated in the Cayman Islands for many years, FundBank launched operations in the U.S in 2024 and began with a clean slate. There were no legacy systems to migrate or old data to reconcile, just the opportunity to design a modern, cloud-native bank from the ground up. The first major milestone came when the bank secured its U.S. banking license from the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC). With regulatory approval in place, FundBank expanded to Luxembourg.

This scalability is expected to support rising transaction volumes and cross-sell activity as the bank expands into new markets.

To power its growth, FundBank adopted end-to-end banking on Temenos SaaS, deployed on Microsoft Azure. Temenos Core Banking is the foundation of the platform while Temenos Digital delivers an intuitive, frictionless online experience for corporate clients. Temenos Payments enables full centralization and real-time control over the processing of any type of payment from any channel or source, with cross-border and multi-currency payments flowing smoothly across multiple clearing systems, including ISO 20022. Financial Crime Mitigation ensures robust compliance, while Temenos Data Hub provides the insights and real-time analytics needed to drive smarter decisions. As adoption increases, FundBank expects cross-sell performance to rise exponentially, supported by deeper insights and more personalized client engagement.

From day one, FundBank set out to be fully digital. Every process, from onboarding to account management, happens online. Clients can open and manage accounts quickly and securely. While the U.S. and Luxembourg operations are entirely digital, the third phase in Cayman Islands will integrate shortly. Behind the scenes, Temenos’ open integration framework connects FundBank to critical third-party systems like Bloomberg and HID, giving the bank the flexibility to customize and extend services without building them from scratch. This digital-first approach is expected to revolutionize onboarding while improving overall customer satisfaction significantly.

FundBank worked closely with Temenos, leveraging their architecture alignment, support, and strategic guidance to ensure every component of the deployment worked seamlessly together. With proven success in countries like Luxembourg, Temenos offered both the technology and the track record FundBank needed, giving the bank confidence as it expanded its global footprint.

EQ Bank launched in 2016 with a groundbreaking vision. As one of the first digital-only banks in Canada, the bank aims to reimagine how customers interact with their financial services provider, offering a smarter and more flexible alternative to the complexity and hassle of traditional banking. In less than a decade it has grown to service half-a-million consumers, and has recently expanded into business banking. 

Daniel Broten, SVP and Head of EQ Bank, explained: “We’re on a mission to change the status quo, with banking services that enrich the lives of our customers. As a digital-only bank, we have a major advantage over traditional banks, as we don’t have to maintain branches and therefore have more resources available to provide customer-centric services at the best possible rates.”

Development speed has been one benefit of its move to cloud. “Ten years ago, we were releasing new features about every two months. Last year, we got that up to 30 every month, and this year, we peaked at 50 per month.”

With that capability, EQ Bank is now rolling out some of the most innovative digital banking services available in Canada. In the near-term, it will publicly launch its first fully digital business account, designed to meet the unique needs of Canadian small business owners, with open banking and real-time payments in scope.

And as part of its inclusion policy, it has created customized onboarding journeys to help indigenous Canadians to access financial services. Similarly, EQ Bank has launched a new low-cost, multi-currency money transfer service through an integration with leading payments provider Wise.

Daniel continued: “Setting up the integration between Temenos Core Banking and Wise was very simple. We quickly and efficiently connected all the debit, credits and payment types needed to allow our customers to make transactions. And we could do this without having to recode any APIs. Using the Temenos SaaS has made it easy for our teams to design, develop and launch new products.”

More recently, it has developed the ‘TDH-EQB Fabric’ environment, an innovative solution enabling near real-time data access within the Temenos Data Hub. The initiative (a collaboration between EQ Bank, Temenos and Microsoft) has already had a profound impact by enabling access to key transactional data within less than 60 seconds; reducing load on the live Temenos Core database by offloading queries for historic and archived transaction data; accelerating operational decision-making by enabling near real-time intraday reporting; and establishing a scalable pipeline to support regulatory reporting.

Daniel commented: “The TDH-EQB Fabric is empowering EQ Bank with faster insights, improved system performance, and a more agile digital ecosystem—all crucial for enhancing the experience we give customers and meeting our regulatory obligations.” 

These new capabilities are now powering the bank’s exploration into AI. For Daniel, AI is a natural extension of what the bank has been focussed on since it launched. “We always strive to create highly personalised experiences for each customer. That’s important at the onboarding stage for a new customer, when you really have to build for trust. The more we can show we know about them as a person, the more intimate and trusting the experience for them. The combination of good data and AI are a massive opportunity to create these moments.”

The innovative new services launched by EQ Bank have gone down extremely well with consumers. So much so EQ Bank has been named to the prestigious World’s Best Banks list by Forbes Magazine for five consecutive years.