Success through community: the key to effective transformation
Max Chuard, our CEO, reflects on this year’s inspirational Temenos Community Forum (TCF 2019) and how banks are responding to the call to ‘digitally reload’
The banking industry is transforming without a shadow of a doubt, and none of us are immune. But I firmly believe that if we come together, not just as an industry with common services and products, but as a community – sharing and learning from one another, driving change to ensure the technologies we have today are relevant for the future – we will be more prepared to make this change our own, and to revolutionize banking.
This rich community is not only vital to the future of banking; it is also unique. By bringing together banks from around the world, along with fintechs, partners, industry analysts, and experts, Temenos provides an unprecedented opportunity for this industry to collaborate in new and innovative ways, sharing ideas, opinions, and solutions to practical problems.
Over the past 25 years we have built this community from the ground up to be the most dynamic in banking. The highlight of our calendar is the annual Temenos Community Forum (TCF). To give an idea of how much our community has grown, there were just 100 attendees at my first TCF, 17 years ago in Barcelona. This April, in The Hague, we hosted close to 2,000 people – not to mention the thousands, who watched the event via live stream.
TCF has become the banking industry event. Nowhere else do all of those groups of banking practitioners, experts and partners come together with an open mind to learn from one another and transform their industry – and I’m so proud at the scale of this collaboration. TCF is a bond that binds our community together, and it goes to the heart of who we are. With each new member, we gain in reach, knowledge and scale. This, in turn, allows us to invest more in our product so that all community members can benefit from the latest capabilities. An innovation delivered to one is innovation for all.
It is only by working together, by pooling requirements and standardizing capabilities that banks will be able to compete and win in this new digital era.
As the industry prepares to respond to today’s challenges – including open banking and diversifying competition; intensifying regulation; growing demands for personalized customer experiences; and new technologies – Temenos community members are ready to transform to face the future quickly, affordably, and sustainably.
The need for speed
I speak regularly with bank CEOs who all tell me the same things: their institutions are under massive pressures to transform; they know they need to change, and be more innovative. Growing technology options, including APIs, cloud services, and artificial intelligence, are adding to the need to move faster. We’re entering an era of continuous innovation, in which banks need to code in the morning, and deploy in the afternoon.
Leading industry analysts such as Jost Hoppermann, from Forrester Research, echo the urgency to transform. Jost recently remarked that if banks don’t modernize with an end-to-end solution, in the next 7-8 years at the latest, they will face huge challenges.
So what’s getting in the way?
Although banks want to be more agile, offer better customer experiences and more relevant products and services, they are challenged by huge costs, and the time it takes to change. Renovating a complete IT stack can take years, while layering on costs that are unacceptable for banks’ boards, and shareholders.
Convenient customization
In order to dramatically reduce transformation costs, and bring agility and innovation to their business, banks need packaged software, localized to the specific needs and banking of individual countries (we have ready-to-go capabilities for 100 countries today), and built on advanced, cloud-native, and cloud-agnostic technology.
Only Temenos has this winning combination, which is based on software principles we have stood by for the past 25 years. This powerful combination of packaged functionality and cloud-agnostic technology enables rapid and affordable deployment, scaling of new capabilities, and maximum agility to adapt, upgrade and add to these as the industry continues to evolve. The benefits of cloud are key to the future of banking transformation, offering rapid and elastic scalability, in-built active-active resilience, massive investments in cloud security, and dramatically reduced total cost of ownership. By providing these incredible benefits across the broadest range of cloud partners, Temenos gives banks the agility to work with the cloud providers they want, and the flexibility to switch when they want.
We also support continuous deployment – short cycles of innovation that get great new functionality up and running quickly. By fully automating change to our software, whether initiated by banks or new updates and upgrades from us, we can significantly improve banks’ innovation cycles, and dramatically cut project costs.
All of these advantages are crystallized in our Temenos Infinity and Temenos Transact products, announced at April’s TCF – read more here.
Banks understand only too well the urgency to overhaul their IT infrastructure and move with the digital times. But, until now, they’ve been unable to justify the massive costs and time implications. Now we’re removing these obstacles, helping banks to move past their legacy restrictions and deliver the innovations their customers expect – quickly and affordably. Just look at HSBC and ABN Amro, whose representatives spoke at TCF about the great innovations they’re rolling out with our technology.
Digital transformation needn’t be complex, protracted, and costly – not in 2019. Thanks to the massive investments Temenos makes, and this proactive and motivated community, our solutions today combine the richest functionality, based on the preferences and best practices of 3,000 banks in more than 150 countries. We’ve built this community across the industry to learn and share from each other, so that any bank, big or small, now has the opportunity to ‘digitally reload’ quickly and cost effectively.
About Max Chuard
Max Chuard has served as Chief Executive Officer of Temenos since 2019 and is responsible for the company’s strategic direction and growth. Max Chuard brings more than 20 years of technology and global leadership expertise to the company. Max Chuard has been recognised as the number 1 SaaS CEO in both 2020 and 2021 – reflecting Temenos’ leadership position in cloud and SaaS technology. Max Chuard has been instrumental in positioning Temenos as the world’s leading open platform for composable banking and driving the next generation of cloud and AI based solutions. Max Chuard chairs the company’s Global CSR & Ethics Committee and is a strong advocate for CSR, diversity, green cloud in the race for net zero and the positive and sustainable impact business can have in society and in the environment overall.