Winning in a SaaS World
Andreas Andreades, Executive Chairman, Temenos
Andreas Andreades keynote at Temenos Kick-Off 2023
The world is changing. There is disruption in banking for sure.
Embedded finance, consuming banking products, in a different context, when the customer journey has nothing to do with a bank.
Whether it’s a buy now pay later, or it’s a mortgage origination or whatever, it is changing the world. It is fundamentally changing the world.
The technology side has enabled all these different business models and SaaS is at the heart of it.
And it’s a different world and competing and winning in a SaaS world is different.
The value proposition is different, the arguments are different, what prospects and clients care about is different.
It’s about scalability, it is about a very deep technical discussion on how superior the solution is, how more durable the solution is.
We’ve always delivered value to banks; this is why banks have stayed with us for 30 years.
This is why a small deal in First Gulf Bank in 2003 in Abu Dhabi has resulted in First Abu Dhabi Bank today being the largest bank in MENA, 180 billion in assets, still working with us and going places.
Why? Because we deliver value. And because we’ve been delivering value, we’ve become everybody’s banking platform. It’s the same software, we package it differently, and we go to market, and that’s a result. And the banks that run our software have been proven to be more profitable.
It’s always been about innovation. We have always been ahead of the curve on innovation, but not in a haphazard way. It’s a continuum.
We are the only ones that effectively protect and abstract the business logic from tech. Whether it was 24×7 moving from branch banking to nonstop processing and elimination of batch processes, which has been the revolution we brought to the market, or the cloud-native story, we are the ones that create the future, we are the ones that create a SaaS model that is upgradable for regulated banking entities.
This is what innovation is all about, and we’ll keep doing it, and there will be a next generation that will come and will handle it, and protecting the fundamentals, and what I have up there, nobody else has.
No other company in the world has. I’m absolutely convinced.
Single product, single code base, for any bank, anywhere.
As I said, small, big, private, wealth, retail. Name it. Fintechs, on-prem, SaaS. Any region. Any country.
We do this in a sustainable way, or we try to, not because it’s also fashionable today, but we believe that it also makes great business sense.
The banks are looking at us and they are saying we want to work with somebody that understands what sustainable means. Can explain to us how we reduce our carbon footprint. It’s a big topic for banks.
This is our true north. This is our compass. But when we do have impossible to solve problems, go back to our true north, and think about people.
You carry people with you, you get people to work with you, you get people to understand what you want to achieve.
Collaborate with people, get people to collaborate with you. You can solve any problem. Any problem. Given a little bit of time, you can solve any problem.
Go back to people being the key. It is about you guys, each one of you. You guys are all truly very important.
All of you. All of us. Each one of us. Think about this and you’ll see that it makes sense. It’s what has kept us for 30 years at the top.
Thank you very much. Have a great TKO and have an outstanding 2023.