Temenos hosted their annual Americas event in Miami this year. And for the first time it was a combined Bank and Credit Union event over two days, with combined keynotes and dedicated tracks for each institution type.
RCG was a Gold Sponsor at the event – with a focus on meeting existing clients, spending time with the Temenos team and building new bank and credit union relationships. It was a successful event on all fronts.
Temenos Strategic Priorities
Rodrigo Silva, President of the Americas for Temenos took the stage early on the first day to talk about Temenos’s strategic priorities. It was great to see that those priorities align with the challenges of their target customer base:
SaaS – delivering a cost effective, scalable and reliable delivery of agile software to support banks and credit unions and the ever changing demands of their customers and the regulators.
Digital – recognizing that digital is no longer an ‘alternative channel’ but the primary channel that customers are choosing to bank through, across retail, commercial and private banking and for transactional banking and origination
AI – acknowledging that AI in the banking sector is different to other industries and therefore MUST be responsible and explainable. If a regulator asks a bank why a loan was approved or declined and the answer is “The AI said so” … that’s the wrong answer.
LEAP – which is Temenos’s branding for their upgrade program which builds on the importance of clients staying ‘current’ with software version updates, but also recognizes the complexity of upgrades in banking, especially core upgrades. LEAP aims to streamline and de-risk upgrade cycles to keep clients current.
Temenos in the US
It will come as little surprise to hear that the US makes up an estimated 35% of the world’s banking technology spend. So for a global fintech player like Temenos, success in the US is critical. And the strategic focus of Temenos on the Americas and Noth America in particular was emphasized by Rodrigo Silva and Global Chief Revenue Officer (and fellow Irishman) Will Moroney.
It was great to see Commerce Bank on stage with Temenos reaffirming their commitment to Temenos, not just for core banking, but payments, origination and digital. Commerce worked with Temenos to develop the US Model Bank for the Temenos core banking platform, Transact, a few years ago. This complex project ensured Temenos Transact (formerly T24) could deal with US product nuances and regulatory compliance for a successful retail bank.
And the completion of the Commerce implementation in early 2022 helped Temenos secure a contract with super regional Regions Bank in April 2023. Regions were also present at the conference, also reaffirming their commitment to deploying Temenos Transact as a core banking solution for the bank.
Microsoft talk Generative AI
One of my personal highlights of the event content was the presentation by Jose Nunez of Microsoft. In addition to highlighting the scale of Microsoft’s cloud investment to support SaaS and AI (60 regions and over 300 datacenters), Jose talked about the fact that organizations investing in AI are seeing a 3.5X return for every $1 invested in AI.
Myself and many others in the audience took photos of this slide from Jose’s deck as it was a ‘thoughtful’ breakdown of the use cases and adoption of AI in banking. I particularly liked how the framing of this slide recognized the fact that most institutions are currently investing in Foundational Capabilities (yellow circles) such as talent and modernizing apps to take advantage of opportunities and then progressing to Productivity opportunities (Green Circles) where Gen AI is being deployed for internal use cases.
And once we have a level of understanding, skill and comfort / trust in this new transformational technology – we can (aspirationally) look towards true Customer Innovation and embedding the technology in the delivery of banking products and services.
Take a moment to look at this chart, the axes, the legend etc – there’s a lot to unpack here.
I’m already looking forward to next years event... but perhaps somewhere cooler than Miami in early September. Colorado is beautiful this time of year.