Success Stories

Scaling with a digital-first approach

Ljubljana, Slovenia

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At a Glance

• Cut product time to market by 50%

• Reduced operational costs by 25%

• 20% faster customer onboarding experience

• 20 years+ Temenos customer

Nova Ljubljanska Banka (NLB) is a conglomerate of banks servicing South-Eastern Europe, with operations in Slovenia, Serbia, Bosnia, Croatia, North Macedonia, Kosovo and Montenegro. It offers universal banking services to the retail and corporate sectors, as well as running an investment banking arm. In six of its markets, NLB accounts for at least 10% of the market share, measured by balance sheet total. That figure currently stands at just over 16bn Euros, with reported profits of 514m Euros. It has 2.7 million customers, including 700,000 retail clients in Slovenia and a further 50,000 SME and large business clients. It manages 68 branches across the region.

Its objective is to be the leading bank in South-Eastern Europe by the end of 2030. To that end it is developing a digital-first operating model, supported by a scalable IT suite.

Two sides to scaling

For Franci Drnovšek, NLB’s IT Delivery Deputy General Manager, this goal consists of a dual strategy; on the one hand to innovate, while maintaining the highest security standards. “With open banking and the arrival of fintechs, customer expectations have never been higher. Today, everyone expects pre-approved investments, transactions to take seconds, and loan applications to take just minutes. So we must adapt to this new reality, by leveraging AI and cloud to innovate faster, but also be very strict about security.”

Always adapting

This journey was made easier thanks to the agility of Temenos core banking, that was first deployed in 2002 for its corporate customers. NLB keeps upgrading to the latest version.

The platform has proved to be very adaptable from the start. Recent examples of this were the incorporation of the new PDS2 regulations that came into force in 2019, and integrating N Banka (previously Sberbank), a newly acquired bank, in 2023. For the latter, go-live was executed over a weekend, following a year of planning and testing. “There was no interruption for our customers, the migration was successful and went smoothly. We were very proud of that.”

Following the success of N Banka retail customers migration to Temenos core, NLB who initially had deployed the core for its corporate clients only, will start migrating its retail customers too.

Customer-centricity in everything

Key to this is ‘Arrangement Architecture’ (AA), a powerful module within the core banking platform that allows banks to design and manage financial products in a more flexible and efficient way. “It means we can be much more customer-centric in everything from our product development to how customers engage with us.” He points to the multi-currency accounts feature and a 20% faster onboarding experience as examples of the step-change that the platform upgrade has delivered.

The bank is also seeing operational benefits.

Pushing on

The bank aims to migrate all its retail customers to the new platform version within 18 months, as well as leverage new capabilities such as Temenos Trade Finance to modernize and automate.