Temenos and Formpipe:
Working Better, Together through Creative Collaboration.
Formpipe marketing manager, Joe Ferro, looks to the future as he reflects on 15 years of collaboration between Formpipe and Temenos.
They say time flies when you’re having fun. And 15 years ago, when we first started working with Temenos, feels like only yesterday. Back then, our primary goal was to help generate and distribute enriched and branded customer-facing documents across their communication channels, including email and print.
Although new to the banking industry at the time, we’d been providing similar solutions across various industries for more than a decade. We’d worked with a wide range of businesses across an equally wide range of Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and enterprise platforms.
Experience taught us that developing and maintaining a robust integration into Temenos Transact – the most widely used digital core-banking solution in the world – would be crucial to Formpipe’s success with Temenos. Therefore, we knew we had to provide both staff and customers with a seamless user experience and expand on the end-to-end capabilities of the core banking system.
Plug and play
It was essential for us to just ‘plug in’ to any Temenos screen, so we had to focus on speed, simplicity, and useability. We had to bring the functionality exactly where it was needed, without breaking out of the Temenos experience or ecosystem. This was easier said than done. Back then, there weren’t any ‘nice’ plug-in points to easily interface with the data. So, we reached out to the Temenos team that had worked on BrowserWeb (the web-based User Interface (UI) method of accessing Transact), and together we discovered with some small but crucial configuration changes, we could create a solid connection point to work from.
The importance of being earnest
We began development in earnest, driven by growing customer demand, along with the practical requirements that our projects and deployments teams were experiencing in-branch and back office. We focused on four integrated ‘out of the box’ interfaces to work in any banking process or vertical:
- Document generation
- Search
- Retrieval
- Upload
Hit the ground running
By focusing on developing and delivering a standard set of interfaces, which included all the key requirements above, it gave us the opportunity to spend more time helping customers plan their document and communication strategies.
Understanding each bank’s internal processes and document needs meant that our solutions could be deployed easily and quickly followed up with co-authored core banking document templates. This meant each bank or financial institution could hit the ground running, knowing their customer communications were effectively taken care of from go-live.
Minimal training required
After minimal training, we could leave clients to create their own documents and forms, enabling them to rapidly become self-sufficient — to focus on serving their customers instead of worrying about their infrastructure.
Documentation: a crucial aspect of development
Supporting this entire process was the documentation, a crucial aspect of the development process, which is so often overlooked by other companies. We needed to ensure our software and interfaces could be easily configured and used by Temenos, system integrators or customers without reliance on us. From the beginning, everything had to be fully packaged with clearly documented procedures and outcomes.
The whole package
We used embedded documentation in our installers as well as ‘living documentation’ using Swagger and hosted documentation on our support site. We always made certain it was a core part of every release cycle and ensured it was always up to date.
As each year passed, we continued to work closely with the development and commercial teams at Temenos. We responded to improvements and new features in their software, as well as an ever-growing list of cutting-edge banking processes that the business solutions teams and potential customers were looking to achieve.
Breaking new ground
Working alongside Temenos has given us the opportunity to be involved in exciting new projects, including cutting-edge cloud banking, which saw both established and challenger banks adopt an entirely new infrastructure based around Temenos’ ‘digital first’ core solution.
On cloud nine
We’re hugely excited by the continued growth of the Temenos Banking Cloud and our integration with it. We’re focused on aligning with the standards of security, redundancy and resiliency required from a 24/7 system and we are continually looking at how we can leverage our experience to take our offering to the next level and take advantage of the flexibility, speed, and power of the cloud across all our own product features.
“For more than 15 years, Temenos and Formpipe have innovated through teamwork and trust. This synergy enables us to push forward together with a harmonious vision of continuous improvement that guarantees success for both organizations.”
Martin Bailey, Product Director Innovation & Ecosystem Temenos
Today, Formpipe has nearly 100 banking institutions on its books, ranging from microfinance operations to challenger banks, all the way up to Tier 1 institutions. From a development perspective our focus is now on the next generation of output and document management solutions. We’re revisiting and reworking our integrations in close collaboration with Temenos and the innovation team to encompass a ‘cloud first’ Software as a Solution (SaaS) delivery model, alongside Infinity, and the newer Transact interfaces.
Change is the only constant
With the ever-changing landscape of security concerns, it’s important we keep improving our security profile and standards. We’ve recently re-architected our cloud platform to support a fully zero trust-based security model. We’ve also implemented audit logging of all actions taken and intelligent alerting to detect any unusual activity. We maintain a strict continuous improvement model when it comes to security, ensuring we evolve and adapt with the times, and earn the trust our customers place in us.
We’re continuously investing in our people, our skills and our infrastructure, which enables us to keep moving forward and build systems using the latest technology. We’ve worked hard on automation and streamlining our installation process, and we’ve gone from a world where deployments of our products might have taken days, to one where they take just minutes. This same automation allows us to scale at the click of a button, with near instant deployment of additional power to match changing customer demand.
“The synergy provided through our partnership with Temenos, as well as our matching ambitions to deliver world-class software solutions to banks and financial institutions across the globe, has led to the continued growth and shared success for both of our businesses.”
Christian Sundin, Formpipe CEO
With the cloud at the heart of our collective ‘now,’ it’s no surprise that a shared vision for the future continues between the development teams at both Temenos and Formpipe. With Martin Bailey, Product Director Innovation & Ecosystem Temenos, and the innovation hub team, together we continue to break new ground in support of a richer and more flexible banking ecosystem. According to Martin Bailey: “For more than 15 years, Temenos and Formpipe have innovated through teamwork and trust. This synergy enables us to push forward together with a harmonious vision of continuous improvement that guarantees success for both organizations.” He said: “Formpipe’s flexibility and agile response to the constantly evolving banking landscape has not only enabled them to keep pace with the rapidly developing fintech ecosystem but thrive alongside Temenos within it.”
Continuous improvement
We remain committed to building on the success of our legacy BrowserWeb integrations and bringing them over to the UXPB (Browser). We’ll do the same on the Infinity side with the Fabric platform. Alongside this, we’re exploring business solutions for Temenos Infinity/Fabric to facilitate the growth potential that awaits.
Transact has some exciting new features that we want to take full advantage of, such as the Data Event Streaming platform (DES) which can collect, aggregate and package events from complex processes for consumption in other systems. This is the just kind of thing our developers love, and it’s a key focus for a project we have lined up, which would solve some core business requirements for our customers.
It will essentially allow for faster, if not immediate, runtime integration of our software — creating a parallel data processing pipeline, allowing us to solve the issue of transforming output from large data generation processes, such as COB or Close of Business runs. So, while the COB run is happening on the Temenos side, we can take that same data, process it on our side, create these amazing documents and archive them. Then customers can see and access those same documents moments later.
Back to the future
Our long-term vision is focused on the Temenos MarketPlace, where we see all this coming together. Allowing potential customers to spin up an environment in whatever configuration they want and giving them the ability to demo the software immediately; letting them play around with the features and functions that will truly allow them to appreciate the real added value that we bring. Having this sandbox environment encourages innovation and new ways of working, while building familiarity and trust, so that when the time to go live comes around, the platform, in whatever configuration it has been deployed, feels natural to everyone that uses it, at every level.
“Formpipe’s flexibility and agile response to the constantly evolving banking landscape has not only enabled them to keep pace with the rapidly developing fintech ecosystem, but thrive alongside Temenos within it.”
Martin Bailey, Product Director Innovation & Ecosystem Temenos
Time flies
After 15 years, we’re still amazed at the enormous creativity and enthusiasm of the development teams at Temenos. And we’re proud to continue supporting internal Temenos development initiatives using our products.
We designed our Autoform DM archive with a rich REST API that makes developing with it in a Temenos environment, easy and well-suited to rapid integration. We receive frequent requests from across Temenos. People have heard about DM and ask, “can I archive documents and then retrieve them in different processes. I want to do something like that in a POC I’m working on. How can I do it?” All we have to do is point them to our REST API, give them a couple of documents, a Postman project and send it over, and they say, “this is great” and literally just run with it. It’s such a good feeling to know that we can help, regardless of the outcome.
It would only be right to give the final word to our CEO, Christian Sundin, who neatly summarizes the way the whole company feels: “Sponsoring the SCALE 2021 Developer Conference and celebrating our 15-year anniversary as a partner with Temenos is truly a milestone. The synergy provided through our partnership with Temenos, as well as our matching ambitions to deliver world-class software solutions to banks and financial institutions across the globe, has led to the continued growth and shared success for both of our businesses. We look forward to many more years as the de-facto standard for document processing and archiving for the Temenos ecosystem and as a leading key solution provider.”
Find out more about the exciting collaboration between Temenos and Formpipe at the Temenos Developer Conference, SCALE 2021.