IBS Intelligence Q1 2022.pdf

Q1 2022
Global Core Banking Vendors
& Landscape Report
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Temenos
Official Website: www.temenos.com/
Founded In: 1993
Type of Ownership: Public
Key Investors: NA
Headquartered In: Geneva, Switzerland
Telephone: + 41 (0) 22 708 1150
Global Office Locations: Asia Pacific, Europe, Latin America, Middle East &
Africa, North America
Staff: ~7,500+
Number Of Clients: 700+
Key Clients: Bank of Shanghai, ABN AMRO, HSBC Bank, Al Khaliji Bank, Al Rajhi
Bank Allied Bank
Key Products: Temenos Transact
Company Twitter Handle: twitter.com/Temenos
Company LinkedIn: linkedin.com/company/temenos/
Key Contact: Muralidharan Narayanswami
Key Contact's LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/muralidharan-narayanswami-56b20b3/
Key Contact's Email: mnarayanswami@temenos.com
IBS Intelligence | Global Core Banking Vendors and Landscape Report 977

Corporate Overview
Temenos was founded in November 1993 and is one of the largest banking software
suppliers globally. The supplier specializes in universal Core Banking systems and
digital banking systems. It launched two new products in January 2019 -Temenos
Infinity, an independent digital front office solution and Temenos 24 Transact, its cloud-
native Core Banking solution.
It supports a wide range of databases, including Oracle, jBase, Microsoft SQL Server,
DB2 and iSeries. Furthermore, it also supports Unix, Linux, System Z and Windows
(server); any client-server supporting Internet Explorer or Firefox (client). Some of the
key functionalities supported: Current and savings account, deposits, loans, Nostro and
Vostro account management, statutory reporting, payments, CD, futures, FX, MM,
equities, FI, asset allocation, securities modelling, cash management, import and export
letters of credit and guarantees.
Temenos’ broad flagship offering, T24 (now rebranded to Temenos Transact), has
gained more than 700 sites across the globe. These are typically universal in nature, for
tier three and four banks or for departmental and/or international operational use by
larger banks.
The supplier has added complementary offerings around the core, largely through
acquisitions, including that of Luxembourg-based Odyssey and its portfolio
management systems. It has also acquired a few companies to gain old user bases,
which it has then tried to migrate to T24, with mixed results.
Temenos Core Banking has broad and deep functionality, surrounded by a range of
other applications. The system is adapted for many international markets. The core
system has a high degree of flexibility, through a lot of parameterisations, with this
subsequently added to some of the newer components. And Temenos has always
invested more into its system in R&D than the industry average, which means it has
always evolved. After the latest release of Core Banking, Temenos has expressed intent
to continue to look out for complimentary products in the market which could enhance
and update the solution. The company is also engaging with some banks to leverage
MarketPlace and the Innovation Jams in more ways, such as using the Dev/test
environment to simulate a new bank where banks can test its innovations before
presenting at a corporate level. In 2018, the supplier initiated a collaboration with
Luxembourg-based Luxhub, a European open banking platform formed by BCEE, BGL
BNP Paribas, Banque Raiffeisen and POST Luxembourg. The partnership is aimed at
helping banks meet PSD2 standards in the region.
978 IBS Intelligence | Global Core Banking Vendors and Landscape Report

There has traditionally been good transparency, with Temenos making its TCF event
open to prospective customers and analysts and with a relatively clear product
roadmap. In its latest TCF event, the focus appears to shift from its core T24 to
developing its capabilities in payments, front office and anti-money laundering (AML). At
the event, Temenos unveiled its new front office suite, offering digital services for
banking customers across the retail, corporate and wealth segments. The solution is a
comprehensive, open, omnichannel, data-driven solution, which combines Temenos’
existing solutions for channels, analytics, risk and compliance with new components
such as an API layer, artificial intelligence (AI) models for customer engagement and
consent management.
Temenos’ deployment model continues to remain heavily dependent on a considerable
number of large and specialist third party resources for T24 (consultants, integrators
etc.) around the world. The flexibility of the system is both a strength and weakness, as it
necessitates strong project management and has been a factor in a number of problem
projects. T24 is not taken for high-end retail banking, and, despite the R&D, there is no
escaping the fact that the core system has long roots, back to the late 1980s.
For smaller banks, as always when dealing with a company with such a large user base
and many ongoing projects at any one time, there is the question of how much attention
they will command in attracting resources and gaining remedial action when there are
problems. Pioneer customers throughout its history, whether with new releases and
components or for new countries (Credit Suisse in Germany, several banks in the
Netherlands), have often had problems.
At a corporate level, the success of the company’s takeovers has been patchy, with the
user bases not typically wanting to migrate to T24. Temenos’ bought or built
applications around the core have been of mixed quality over the years, and there has
been some chopping and changing of strategy and positioning. Reliance on third parties
to implement T24 can be an issue, depending on the experience of the resources.
The future is on the cloud, and in preparation for this, Temenos launched the new
versions of its Core Banking and digital front-office solutions - T24 Transact and Infinity,
respectively, in January 2019. The move is mainly to cement its positioning as a digital
banking software leader. The customer wins in the past year, and Q1 2019 indicate that
Temenos has gained a strong following from challenger banks and neo banks. This
success is likely to give Temenos an edge over the others when its large customer
based on T24 customers decide to upgrade and overhaul their Core Banking systems.
History

T24 started as a system for corporate banking, built in the mid-1980s by a UK-based
company, Electronic Banking Systems (EBS). The developer was Ernst Hennche, who
had headed an in-house development at Citibank to build a core system, dubbed
Cosmos, for international operations. The EBS system was launched as Globus and was
initially developed for the Pick operating system on Prime hardware. It was launched in
1988, and a version for Unix followed soon after.
By the middle of 1991, there were only 15 users of the system, mostly in continental
Europe, plus a handful in Nigeria won via a local distributor. At this stage, EBS did not
have a user in its domestic UK market.
EBS changed hands, residing for a short while with a Swiss company called COS AG
(which had partnered with EBS) before the business was bought by George Koukis. He’d
made his money in reseller businesses in the Asia Pacific and was looking at the Core
Banking systems market when he came across the opportunity to buy the Globus
business from its struggling parent.
The arrival of Koukis came in November 1993 and was followed by steep growth in terms
of sales, revenue, headcount, global presence, and profile. There were certainly some
rocky times along the way, including cash flow problems and failed implementations.
Grandiose ambitions didn’t always come to fruition but, overall, it was a remarkable
turnaround, with Temenos becoming one of the two leading selling Core Banking
system providers over the next two decades (alongside I-flex Solutions, now Oracle FSS,
with Flexcube), a position that it retains today.
The company quickly became over-stretched after almost doubling its user base in 1994
(it had 29 new-name wins), but the ambitious and charismatic Koukis was often able to
win round the customers. There was a recapitalisation in 1995, which eased the financial
issues. Meanwhile, the company put a lot of investment into R&D so that the system
became ever broader, often with joint development work with customers. A Chennai-
based development centre was added and grew quickly.
Temenos floated on the Swiss Stock Exchange in 2001 and, as usual, didn’t do things by
halves. There was a steep fall in the share price and some substantial losses. Rumours of
a sale of the company circulated, but these were always denied by Koukis.
A lot of Temenos’ sales success was – and to a degree still is – on the back of
distributors, and it bought a few of these down the years. It acquired its Malaysian
distributor in 2002; it did the same in Latin America with the Globus distributor part of
Hennche’s company, Ecuador-based Fisa Systems, then it did the same in Russia,
resulting in a joint venture company in which Temenos took a 51 per cent stake.

The company went through several periods of significant corporate upheaval, although
things have been much calmer in the last few years. This followed a tenure of one year
for a new CEO, Guy Dubois. It was unusual for Temenos to go outside the company for
any senior manager, let alone CEO. He moved from CEO at a mobile communications
firm, Mach Group. He took the reins of Temenos on 1st July 2011. Andreas Andreades,
Temenos’ CEO, became chairman, while Koukis relinquished this position and took up
the role of non-executive director.
It was interesting with hindsight to look at the reasons cited for Dubois’ appointment
(given the U-turn a year later). There was a need, it was stated, for a CEO experienced in
‘much bigger operations’. Although Dubois lacked banking software experience, he
‘understands the challenges that large software organisations face today in terms of
dealing with the vast amount of legacy code they’ve built over the years. The challenges
and solutions, whether it be the banking or telecoms sector, are not dissimilar,’
Andreades had stated.
A short-lived but intriguing twist came during Dubois’ time at the helm, in the first half of
2012. Temenos and Misys (now Finastra) went public on merger discussions in February,
sparking share volatility and much debate. Any form of a merger would have thrown up
several immediate questions. Temenos had aggressively gone after the ageing user
bases of Misys’ Midas and Equation systems, with limited success. Meanwhile, Misys
was positioning its much newer Bankfusion solution as the upgrade route for these user
bases, as well as touting it as the next-generation Core Banking system, with Temenos’
customers in its sights.
The two companies had decided on the all-share merger, senior management positions,
listing, head office etc., but the merger did not come to pass. Venture capital firms
promptly started a bidding war for Misys with cash offers (and, notably, not for
Temenos). Given the Temenos deal would have been purely a share swap, the cash
aspect was attractive. Temenos claimed to remain interested in a short while but then
dropped out of the running. Vista Equity Partners eventually acquired Misys.
After several poor quarters, in early July 2012, Dubois resigned. Temenos cited ‘personal
reasons. The old guard was back in charge, with CFO David Arnott, as the new CEO. The
CFO role was filled by Max Chuard, another Temenos veteran and previously director of
corporate finance and investor relations. Andreades switched from group chairman to
executive chairman. This brought a much-needed period of stability in terms of the
company’s financials, share price and strategy.

Since then, Temenos has continued to chart growth in terms of its products, revenue,
customers, and geographies. 2014 was one of the most profitable years for the
company, with a marked improvement in its Americas revenues. In September 2016, in
line with its growth strategy in the US market, the company opened a new and expanded
North America HQ in Malvern, Pennsylvania. The move was based on market research
conducted by the company, which shows that the US represented 40% of the company’s
addressable market.
2017 proved to be a good year for Temenos, with a 22% annual growth in software
licensing. Of this, around 10% is derived from SaaS and the subscription model. As per
Temenos, Tier 1 and 2 banks contributed about 59% of the total software licensing.
Europe continues to be Temenos’ prime geography for sales, followed by the Americas
and the Asia Pacific. In comparison, the Middle East and Africa is a growing area for the
company.
In May 2017, the company also completed the acquisition of Rubik Financial Ltd
(originally announced in February 2017), a leading software provider to the financial
services sector in Australia. Founded in 2007, Rubik was a provider of banking, wealth
management and mortgage broking solutions, primarily in Australia and internationally
across Asia and the Middle East, with over 900 clients. With the acquisition, Temenos
hopes to leverage Rubik’s presence in the Australian market and accelerate growth
across its key target segments, including wealth, core and digital banking and fund
administration.
At the beginning of 2018, Temenos had proposed the acquisition of UK technology
company Fidessa in a £1.4 billion deal. Fidessa provides equity and derivatives trading
tools and market data for investment banks, brokers, and fund managers. The
acquisition was expected to help Temenos leverage Fidessa’s dominance in capital
markets. However, Fidessa was finally acquired by Ion Investment Group for £1.5 billion.
Product History
The original Globus was built using the Universe database and development
environment from Westboro, Massachusetts-based VMark Software. This allowed the
early shift from the Pick operating system to Unix, as it brought a degree of platform
independence.
A Windows NT version of Globus was made feasible by the arrival of NT support within
the VMark environment. After some teething trouble, a demonstration version was

shown at a user group meeting in March 1997, with a pilot supposedly signed up in the
form of an existing user, Conseil de l’Europe, in Paris. In fact, the dates shifted, with
Globus on NT finally made available at the start of 1998. The NT and Unix versions had
identical functionality and business code.
In 1997, a full graphical user interface was delivered and then an NT-based client
element. The latter was written in Visual Basic and allowed users to design menus and
screens and do enquiries via drag and drop. The application code was unchanged.
Reflecting the use of the system in larger sites, in 1997, there was also the addition of
multi-threading support for improved end-of-day processing.
Globus/T24 was tied to the Universe database for a long while. The first step to today’s
T24 came with Temenos’ move off the proprietary environment and database, a project
that finally started, after a few false dawns, in 1999. As with most things to do with
Temenos, it wasn’t straightforward.
One reason cited for the move was reliance on a single technology supplier and, in fact,
not long after, the Universe business was acquired by Informix. There were also
performance issues with Universe as the supplier pushed Globus into larger sites. The
environment was well regarded from a technical point of view. In theory, there was no
limit to the number of end-users that could be supported, but there were issues with
large files. ‘It is very I/O intensive,’ said one Globus user. There was also the question of
market perception, with the platform sometimes proving a problem for the supplier
when bidding with Globus.
It is believed that the migration project was particularly brought into focus by interest
from Credit Suisse Private Bank. The bank took Globus for its international branches.
However, at the head office level, it seemed the bank was worried about the ability of the
Universe-based Globus to handle its volumes. An evaluation commenced, with Temenos
staff on-site at the bank, but it came to nothing, seemingly being replaced by a project
involving Swiss supplier, TKS-Teknosoft (now part of TCS).
Nevertheless, Temenos pressed on with the migration of Globus. In October 1999, it
acquired a US company, jBase Software. Based in Portland, Oregon, jBase specialised in
technology to allow companies to migrate Pick-based applications to Unix and
Windows, initially through a conversion from Basic to C. It continued to operate as a
separate company after the takeover while also providing Temenos with enabling
technology.

The version of the system running with the jBase database was now to be the standard
version of Globus. By mid-2001, it was not yet live, but there were a couple of
implementations, one of which was at Credit Suisse Private Bank, which had put the
Universe version of Globus into several sites, including Singapore, Hong Kong and the
Bahamas, and then took the jBase version for Madrid and Guernsey. An Oracle version
was supposedly taken by Kumari Bank and Machhapuchchhre Bank in Nepal, plus a
bank in London.
The next step, T24, was a substantial revamp of Globus. The supplier hailed the new
version as a non-stop, 24x7 solution which removed the need for end-of-day processing.
It was presented to existing Globus users as the logical upgrade path and would replace
Globus as the supplier targetted prospective new clients.
Much of the direction stemmed from a deal at ING in May 2002, and, with a corporate
banking slant, it would have seen one version of Globus for Europe, another for Asia and
another for the Americas to support all countries except the Netherlands, Belgium, and
Germany. The project was intended to take four years. Temenos was faced with making
Globus more scalable and with solving several issues regarding end-of-day
performance.
T24 was directly derived from Globus and, as such, represented version 14 of the system
rather than a truly new offering. The architecture was substantially altered, and this was
one of the supplier’s arguments for rebranding. The end-of-day batch process was
replaced by a ‘Close of Business’ function, which provides a cut-off point after which all
transactions are attributed to the following day. To improve reliability, Temenos sought
to shift from a client-server model to an n-tier architecture. Via a browser, it claimed the
system could be scaled horizontally and could support multiple application servers.
All Globus users operating on Universe were expected to migrate to jBase, and Temenos
set a deadline for this of the fourth quarter of 2005. Temenos said it would offer the
conversion ‘completely free of charge’ to current clients.
There was certainly some confusion about which banks had, and had not, signed for
T24. However, by mid-2004, Temenos seemed to have sorted out its messages. At this
stage, there were three early adopters under implementation from the existing user
base – Schroders in Zurich, Hatton National Bank in Sri Lanka, and one other ‘major’
customer.
In total, there were apparently 14 T24 implementations under way. General availability
had supposedly come in April 2004. The three pilots were moving to the jBase version;
of the others, around half had apparently opted for Oracle.
In terms of the Oracle version, the turn of events at ING was worrying. By February 2004,
it had become clear that the bank’s major implementation had changed in scope, with

the emphasis switching to a Singapore hub and replacement of the bank’s old Internet-
derived Atlas back-office system. As such, the bank was no longer intending to install
the system for Western Europe, at least in the short and medium term. Although this was
a blow for Temenos, it remained a substantial project and was still described by the bank
as strategic.
Despite the change of tack, ING’s general manager for IT at the time, Johan De Meyer,
said that the centralised processing functionality promised by Temenos looked to be in
place and workable. The bank had decided to go with the jBase version rather than
Oracle, seemingly due to concerns about the performance of the latter.
At the start of 2005, it was announced that the ING project had been cancelled. The
bank proposed to revert to its existing systems. A joint statement cited ‘internal reasons’
for the cancellation of its project; no one from the bank would comment further.
Temenos general manager, Jean-Michel Hilsenkopf, said the Oracle version was not an
issue, with recent benchmarks having been ‘in line with the requirements of the bank’. At
the same time, he admitted that another project, at Barclays Asset Management, was ‘on
hold’ – again, he blamed a revised strategy by the bank.
Generally, banks taking Globus/T24 for new technology platforms, whether database or
operating system, had problems. Credit Suisse, MKB in Hungary and Bank Thai had
issues, and this meant others were reluctant to take new components being promised
within T24. MKB’s deputy chief executive, Csilla Bolla, believed that the theory behind
T24 was correct, with this a common reaction from users. ‘In business terms, we do see
opportunities,’ she said. ‘We have quite a lot of problems with the length of the end-of-
day, even with our number of transactions.’
The sentiments were like those of Credit Suisse’s project head, Hans Deelen. He said he
had no problem with the ideas and concepts behind T24. Indeed, with the bank using
Globus for multiple operations, the centralised version might be a means of rationalising
its infrastructure. ‘Strategically, it is very interesting to us.’ However, there were time-to-
market and budgetary considerations. ‘It seems the newer the version, the longer the
implementation projects.’
Of the T24 pilots, Schroders had clear short-term goals for the new release, as well as
seeing potential long-term benefits. The bank went live with Globus in Zurich in April
2003 to replace Unisys’ Bancos. It had a data warehouse and client correspondence
systems which were now fed by the ‘XML Factory’ component of Globus, which
Schroders’ deputy CEO, Heinz Scheiwiller, felt was particularly powerful. On the
warehouse front, the XML approach meant a fresh load of data from Globus into the
warehouse took 20 to 30 minutes.

Schroders decided to pilot T24 in part for specific functionality, with the new release
bringing enhanced support for asset management, with a lot of this driven by Schroders
itself. The bank was also hoping to gain benefits from the switch from full end-of-day
processing to the reduced Close of Business. The bank had never had a problem with
the end-of-day, said Scheiwiller, with this typically taking three hours. However, the
batch processing was supervised until it had closed successfully, requiring one person
to stay late each evening. The Close of Business should be shorter and more resilient. If
the Close of Business crashed, there would, in theory, be no need to restore the
database and restart from scratch. This change was described by Scheiwiller as a
‘massive technical enhancement’ and one that Schroders planned to test very
thoroughly.
Restarting from the point of failure necessitated precise knowledge within the system of
what records had been updated and which had not. He said the ability to run the system
while the Close of Business was running was potential of interest if the bank decided to
centralise processing across multiple operations (the bank also had Globus in London
and Guernsey). ‘It is nice to know we can [support multiple operations] if we want to.’ He
felt this capability might be particularly useful if Schroders wanted to open operations in
a new country, with the ability to establish a front office while hooking into a remote back
office, thereby reducing costs, and accelerating the set-up. The 24x7 and browser
capabilities of T24 would also provide a firm base when Schroders decided the time was
right to provide direct, web-based access for clients, he felt. Scheiwiller foresaw doing
this in two to three years’ time, using the browser support of T24 rather than adopting a
separate e-banking layer.
Hatton National Bank was clearly a totally different type of bank, focusing not on high
net-worth individuals but on the Sri Lankan masses. It had totally different reasons for
piloting T24. The bank’s progress with Globus since signing in 1999 had not been
smooth, to put it mildly, with lots of problems linking in its branch network. It hoped that
T24 would overcome this, but in 2007 it opted instead for Infosys’ Finacle.
There is no doubt that the first year of the release of T24 was a troubled one for supplier
and pilot users alike. It was not until Release 5 that performance and quality issues
looked to be under control. Koukis admitted that Temenos had tried to do too much too
quickly in terms of both technology and functionality.
Among the remedial steps were advisory boards for retail, private and Islamic banking.
Temenos also said it would further tighten release procedures and have only one release
per year. There would be less customisation and an emphasis on a ‘model bank’ version
of T24 (the first time it had used this term). For both performance and quality, the fact
that R5 of T24 seemed to be a marked improvement on R4 suggested that Temenos

was, indeed, addressing the problems. R5 particularly brought multi-threading
capabilities.
By June 2005, Temenos was claiming 40 T24 takers, with 25 or so live. Schroders in
Zurich was among those to have cut over, moving from R12.2 of Globus to R4 of T24 with
jBase and Sun Solaris. Vietnam-based Sacombank, after an eight-month project,
became the first to go live on R5, opting for Oracle. Bank of Botswana went live with the
jBase version to replace Misys’ Bankmaster. Bank Leumi in Switzerland also went live
with the jBase version to replace Misys’ Midas. Alubaf International Bank in Tunis went
live with jBase and IBM AIX after a six-month project, while Credit Suisse in Singapore
had done so as well. However, by no means all of these were live with all elements.
The experiences of another pioneer, Saudi Hollandi Bank, were also interesting. Core
customer accounts and share trading went live in January 2005, with payments in June,
at which time the roll-out started for the bank’s 40 branches. The Islamic module was
part of subsequent phases. That module had been fleshed out with Bank Al-Bilad and,
according to Saudi Hollandi CIO Hakam Abu-Zarour, covered six of Saudi Hollandi’s nine
Islamic banking products offered at the time.
T24 clearly required considerable work at Saudi Hollandi, with the tuning of the Close of
Business a key part of this. The Oracle version was initially very slow, said Abu-Zarour,
but a lot of work was done on this. By the time of the cutover, it was taking around three
hours, but, in one extreme case during testing, a change to the customer charge table
saw this become 25 to 28 hours. Users should plan to spend a fair amount of time tuning,
he said. ‘Our biggest issue is always the Close of Business and how long it takes – it can
go from three hours to ten hours to twelve hours.’
Some of the bank’s problems were to do with customisation. For instance, the bank
added some reports to the Close of Business, but these adversely affected the
performance, so they were removed. On the upside, the online performance had been
‘excellent’ (at mid-June, it had 55 users on the system, with this to become 600 when the
project was complete). For payments, the bank did a benchmark with 60,000
transactions. The first time this was done, the Close of Business took ten hours; after
tuning, it was down to three.
One unpleasant surprise for Saudi Hollandi were the hardware requirements. The bank
originally envisaged relatively small IBM machines but ended with two IBM p690s, with
Oracle clustered across both and with six CPUs on each machine for the database and
six on each for T24. One machine supported the share trading part of T24; the other
modules resided on the other machine. There were several other lessons. Zarour

advised banks to stick to the ‘Model Bank’ as offered by the system – the moment you
start to move away from this, complexities arise, he said. Reports and inquiries should
be optimised, as they can have a major impact on performance, whether online or at the
close of business.
One part of T24 which was not proven within the initial 25 or so live sites was centralised
processing, which ING would have implemented. A few Globus users used their system
for centralisation, including Dresdner Lateinamerika (prior to being sold to UBS in 2005),
AIB and EFG Bank (the latter as it had pursued an acquisition strategy over the previous
few years). By mid-2005, several multi-site Globus users were apparently considering
replacing outlying systems with a centralised T24 (Mashreq Bank was suggested). Also,
on the way was support for SQL Server, with availability set for the second quarter of
2006, dependent on performance tests. Jih Sun Commercial Bank in Taiwan, which had
taken T24 on a Microsoft platform, was suggested as a possible taker of the SQL Server
version.
Some light was shed on the whole Model Bank concept within a 2006 deal at Bank of
East Asia in London, an early recipient of such a supposed Model version, to replace
Misys’ Midas. Under the general manager in the UK, Joseph Chow, the bank set about
implementing this. By now, Temenos was pushing the Model Bank route as strategic,
centred on a largely pre-configured version of T24, supposedly based on best practice.
T24 was ‘very flexible’, said Chow, but this came with a down-side in terms of set-up
times and the potential for ‘project creep’ if there was not strong project management
(incidentally, he felt Flexcube, which the bank had rejected at the shortlist stage, was
more rigid than T24, so more of a standard package).
However, the Model Bank theory and reality were some ways apart. Temenos’ Model
Bank team was based in its centre in Chennai. The bank sent specifications on its
operations to this team in late 2005, and the Temenos team visited the bank shortly
after for systems analysis. One of the lessons was that the visit, which lasted about two
and a half weeks, was not long enough and did not go into sufficient detail. ‘You need to
ensure a good user specification and ensure that the other side understands how you
work. The Model Bank team didn’t spend enough time and, I think, didn’t want to.’ Chow
also felt that the team was not up-to-speed with UK market requirements.
The problems became apparent when a first cut of the Model Bank solution was
delivered to the bank in late February/early March. Testing soon threw up gaps. There
was a lot of discussion and arguments between the bank and the Chennai team. The
emphasis from the supplier was on the bank to adapt to the system, whereas the users’
response was, ‘we’ve still got to deliver to the customers. There were aspects where it
was felt that adapting would have a negative impact on service. Chow felt the Chennai

team was incentivised based on the go-live date, and so it wanted to preserve the vanilla
state of its T24 version. The response to the bank’s requests was often ‘no, that can’t be
done’ but what was meant was, ‘no, that can’t be done with the Model Bank version’.
In the end, the issues were sorted out, and the bank went live. It is likely that Temenos
learnt as much from the project as the bank did – this was, after all, one of the first
attempts to take the Model Bank route. ‘The Model Bank was a bit of a disappointment,
but I think they learnt a great deal,’ said Chow. He felt that Temenos’ latest strategy, to
come up with different Model Banks for different types of institutions, such as private or
Islamic banks, reflected such a realisation.
In terms of the centralised support within T24, there was a breakthrough in April 2007
when Schroders became the first institution to centralise its IT infrastructure using T24
on a multi-currency basis, so as it had envisaged. The core T24 went live with a central
hub configuration in Schroders’ new Private Banking Service Centre (PBSC) in Zurich,
supporting its mainland UK, Guernsey, and Swiss private banking subsidiaries. This was
an important breakthrough for Temenos, as full centralised processing had been such a
cornerstone of the T24 overhaul.
The system had been installed at the service centre on Sun Solaris servers and was fully
operational across the three entities, said Schroders’ Scheiwiller. He reported that the
Close of Business processing was running smoothly and quickly for the three
subsidiaries, completing in around one and a half hours. Schroders had been able to
extend to London and Guernsey all the functionality it had originally built in Zurich. One
benefit was that the same reporting templates were used for each subsidiary, with local
market adaptations having been made by the bank where required. Scheiwiller believed
that Schroders was the first T24 client to run on a centralised basis across at least two
different base currencies and three different countries and legal entities.
With the system stable, Schroders planned to embark on three new projects with T24.
The first was the addition of client browser-based access via its website. The second
was the introduction of a third-party custodian element for securities. This would allow
clients, particularly institutional investors, to keep the same reporting regime whilst
maintaining several custodians. The third major task would enhance the management of
portfolios. Temenos was already working with Deutsche Bank to build additional
dynamic modelling and constraint management functionality into T24 to assist its
portfolio managers. However, Scheiwiller confirmed that Schroders was planning ‘to
enhance the system a bit further.’ It had centralised a lot of its activities, such as
customer management, at the same time. It had apparently reduced costs in the UK by
more than 50 per cent.

A Java version of T24: The other dimension to the recent technical work was the arrival
of the full Java version of T24. This gained a first live site in late 2011 at Swissquote in
Switzerland, which stated that this version was stable, with satisfactory performance.
The Java version of T24 had initially been promised in May 2010 for IBM’s z Series
platform with DB2. Benchmarks were expected during the summer in IBM’s labs in
Montpellier. Early results showed a throughput of more than 4000 transactions per
second, said Gunning. The work had been under way for some time, he said, ‘and it plays
very neatly with IBM’s strategy with the z Series’. Previously, T24 could run on this
mainframe platform but only via a Linux partition. However, Gunning emphasised that
the Java version, to be released with the next version of T24, Release 11, would ultimately
be available for any platform that supported Java. The migration from the C deployment
was relatively mechanical, but optimisation was key, he said. Importantly, Temenos
would retain both versions. The C version was very well-proven, he said, and if Temenos
did not have a version that could run on Windows, then it would be closing off a major
platform.
Swissquote had over 150,000 clients out of about 400,000 online traders in Switzerland,
and its aim was to automate its processing as much as possible. Paolo Buzzi, the firm’s
CTO, said this was ‘not just to reduce the cost, but also because if you can automate your
processes, they will be more efficient, faster and with fewer errors’. The new system
would interface to Swissquote’s proprietary front office software.
Its existing NewBanking solution was owned by a consortium including Unisys and FB
Consulting before it was acquired by Viveo. Swissquote was starting to outgrow the
system when Temenos acquired Viveo. ‘It was a good time for us to ask whether our
current system would still be good for the next ten years, and we took the opportunity to
check the Swiss market and different packages,’ said Buzzi.
Swissquote was looking for a Java replacement for NewBanking, as the back-office
system needed to interact with the customer-facing front-end, which was Java-based.
‘Many vendors proposed Java interfaces, but with core systems that are quite old. T24
was the only one that was fully Java,’ said Buzzi. Swissquote, therefore, signed to
become the first institution to implement the Java version of T24, which was released
earlier in 2010.
‘As far as I know, the Java version is finished,’ Buzzi said. He felt that T24 was ‘quite
flexible’ and was reassured by the size of the user base. Meanwhile, the risk of being the
first to implement the Java version of T24 would be lessened by the fact that the legacy
system was still in place and maintained by Temenos. Buzzi expected that building the

interfaces between T24 and the front-office solution would be straightforward. The
interfaces would be based on XML messages sent with Java Message Services (JMS).
While the focus of the implementation was not to cut costs, one area where this was felt
possible was corporate actions. This was a goal of Swissquote for the medium term. ‘If
we can automate corporate actions, it will save plenty of manual work, and Temenos
seem ready to work with us on it. It will be tough to automate all corporate actions, but if
we can fix the most frequent ones, that would be a good step,’ said Buzzi.
The cutover to T24 had been planned for March 2011 but occurred on 1st September.
According to Swissquote, the Java version of T24 had proved to be stable, with a strong
commitment to the project from Temenos and with the expectation that T24 would
support the institution’s future growth.
By the start of 2015, apparently, five or six customers were live with the Java version of
T24 with the number of additional implementations in ‘high single digits’. The machine
sizing for the two versions was identical, said Gunning.
Later releases of T24: There were supposed to be over 200 enhancements in R11. For
trade finance, these included originating import letters of credit via the web and online
facility management. In the syndicated lending space, R11 allowed multiple products in a
single facility. In R12 of T24 was promised enhanced uploads and downloads of
documents. Areas such as supply chain finance, e-invoicing, factoring, and forfeiting
were touted to be targeted in future. For cash management, R11 brought more support
for pooling, inter-company lending, and other areas, and Temenos said it would be using
componentisation to create a standalone cash management product.
For retail banking, the promised product bundling was a new feature, enabling products
such as offset mortgages. Product eligibility was now rules-based. R12 of T24 for retail
would see the introduction of the master and sub-account arrangements and greater
functionality for savings products, such as inflation linking and goal setting. More
generally, the user experience had been improved with greater use of rich internet
applications.
By TCF in Barcelona in May 2012, Temenos was ready to announce another part of the
component architecture, Temenos Enterprise Frameworks Architecture (TEFA), which
is an integration framework. This promised ‘codeless integration’ in the words of John
Schlesinger, chief enterprise architect at Temenos, and was demonstrated by Microsoft,
one of the sponsors of the event, writing a user interface to T24 for Windows 8 in 100
hours, without input from Temenos engineers.

Loustau broke TEFA into a design framework, a component framework, a platform
framework and an integration framework. The design framework stemmed from the
Odyssey acquisition. It was thought that this was originally conceived by Odyssey as a
Design Studio, but it had not been developed by the time of the acquisition. It was
supposed to be a web-based configuration tool for both of Odyssey’s products
(Wealthmanager and Triple-A Plus), and Odyssey had committed to its development for
ABN Amro as a beta customer. It is intended to give designers the ability to write
screens outside of T24 before putting them into a source control system and from there
into the production system and should cut down the process of building ‘model banks’
for different countries. And the component framework is supposed to allow the upgrade
of individual modules without disrupting the rest of the user community.
The integration framework, available as part of R12, promised ‘code-free integration. The
platform framework would see an effort to push the almost one million lines of code in
T24 back into the platform, so there should be less need by customers for T24 skills. The
component framework was on the roadmap after R13. The TEFA concept also picked up
on the AA module. Mark Winterburn, group product director, stated that 14 clients were
already live on AA (including North Shore Credit Union in Canada) and that others were
currently implementing it.
By the start of 2015, all retail functionality and SME lending was apparently supported by
the AA. More ‘esoteric’ products, such as commercial lending, were outside AA, and
Gunning felt the most complex products, such as syndications, would always remain so.
Between them, the different parts are supposed to reduce the risk of software
replacement, not least by only implementing single components of T24. As Schlesinger
stated, the aim is for T24 to be a complete platform for universal banking plus a
selection of standalone modules that can be used as a niche system at larger
institutions. Benchmarks had apparently shown 9.3 million accounts supported on AA.
In one other development, Temenos is seeking to bring to market an app-store,
Temenos Application and Module Store. This was initially scheduled for Q4 2013. ‘The
purpose of this store is to provide a marketplace for reusable software extensions and
applications for the Temenos community,’ explained Gunning. T24 and Temenos
Connect had a long history of third parties ‘developing software to extend and
complement the core functionality’, he commented, ‘so the products lend themselves to
this type of enrichment.’ The app store would only be accessible by Temenos and its
clients and partners. Participants would be able to browse available applications and
modules and download them.

Contributors to the store would include partners, Temenos itself and ‘clients who will be
able to upload enhancements that they have written for use by the wider community’, he
said. ‘Our objective is to broaden and formalise the Temenos vendor community,
providing more choice and transparency for our clients.’ This venture closely resembled
the already up and running app stores of a few other vendors, including Fiserv and Jack
Henry in the US. The former had an app-store for the users of the DNA core platform
(originally the Open Solutions development, brought to market prior to the vendor’s
takeover by rival Fiserv), and the latter offered PowerOn Marketplace for users of the
Episys credit union system.
The app store didn’t seem to have moved forwards much a year and a half after its
launch. It was now described by Temenos as a ‘Marketplace’, with the first version not
having the ability to buy anything. The first release, for some time in 2015, would have
some front-end widgets for connectivity (such as to Facebook), and there was likely to
be a couple of connectors from partners (for linking to their applications, but with users
then needing to separately buy those applications). It would constitute a ‘shop window’,
said Gunning, for other applications but without the ability to download. He envisaged a
move towards a more functional app store in 2016.
The next component announcement was in 2014, with the unveiling of the Database
Framework, which is further intended to help Temenos pick up clients in the tier one
space. One of Temenos’ largest clients, JPMorgan Chase, was unveiled as the beta
customer for the framework. The idea of the Database Framework is to split the
transactional (read-write) from the reporting (read-only) database at a bank, leading to a
couple of benefits.
The first is to cut down on the size of the transactional database. A typical T24 user
would see a 65 per cent reduction, Temenos claimed. In JPMorgan Chase’s case, the
database size should drop from five terabytes to under 300 gigabytes, making it easier
to store, recover and back up. The second related improvement is in query performance.
A read-write database is usually optimised for transactions rather than reporting, but as
the world moved to online and mobile banking, so Temenos expected the ratio of
queries to transactions to rise from maybe five to one to 500 to one and beyond.
Running queries from the read-only database, which could be updated from the read-
write database in near real-time, should improve the speed and breadth of the queries
run. For the largest banks this should mean better analysis of data and better ability to
run campaigns.
This framework was in the early stages of development, with phase one available in R14
of T24 and more functionality promised for 2015.

Functionality History
In the early days, functionality was often through joint developments with customers.
For instance, a letter of credit module was added with Bank Handlowy in Luxembourg in
1992. A syndicated loans module followed in 1995 and then support for forward rate
agreements (FRAs). A new release, G7, in mid-1996, brought a module for interest rate
swaps, support for past due processing, and added management information
capabilities. Release G8 at the end of 1997 brought support for repos and enhanced risk
management.
The development efforts saw the creation of product management groups to oversee
areas from the initial concept through to delivery. By the start of 2000, there were
groups for private banking (a multi-site deal signed with Kredietbank in the third quarter
of 1997 was important here), trade finance (Dresdner Lateinamerika was a partner),
futures and options, financial risk management, and retail banking.
An asset management module was under development in 2005, and there had been a
lot of work in syndicated lending within an over-running project at Caja Madrid (now part
of Bankia).
Today, there is not a system as broad as T24. It is multi-branch, multi-currency, multi-
base currency, and multi-lingual. It spans customer and counterparty management with
operational and analytical CRM. There is a general ledger, plus support for current and
savings accounts, deposits, loans, Nostro and Vostro account management, cash and
stock reconciliations, and statutory reporting. There are batch and real-time Swift
interfaces, management reporting and profitability analysis.
Retail banking support includes administration of tills, local and foreign currency
transactions, travellers’ cheques, denomination control, cheques, sweeps, deposits,
funds transfer, mortgages, personal loans, remittances, passbooks, signature
verification, direct debits, ATM/POS links, and mutual funds/unit trusts. There is offline
branch functionality where required.
Private banking support includes coverage for multiple client types such as advisory,
execution-only, managed, or discretionary, custody and external custody. T24 handles
equities, fixed income, funds, futures, options, structured products, gilts, repos, CDs,
precious metals, and fiduciaries. There is order management support from order entry
through execution to trade settlement.
Portfolio management capabilities including asset allocation, securities modelling,
rebalancing, and cash management, with online and periodic client valuations. There is
performance reporting, including whole portfolio returns, instrument level returns and
returns at a segmented level, plus back-office support for corporate actions and

transfers and processing of transactional and periodic fees. There is also support for
intermediaries.
Wholesale functionality includes treasury across foreign exchange, money markets,
forward, FX and interest rate swaps, and FRAs. Front office treasury functions are also
supported so too electronic banking. There is deal capture, blotter, position monitoring,
limit monitoring, risk monitoring, and VaR calculations.
Corporate banking components including corporate cash management, commercial
and syndicated loans, import and export letters of credit, clean/documentary
collections, incoming and outgoing, clean payments and guarantees.
For payments, Temenos claims to have built a full engine to compete with the likes of
ACI and Fundtech, working with ABN Amro. By October 2014, ABN Amro was still not
live, but Temenos was claiming another ‘large European bank’ as a taker for what is now
dubbed the Temenos Payments Suite (TPS). Into 2015, there was still no cutover at ABN
Amro but, with the European taker and another in Latin America, there was work to
further enhance the functionality of TPS, and it was expected to become the standard
payment engine within future T24 sales, albeit still also positioned as a product.
Treasury and corporate banking are still an area of strength, and plenty of deals have
this emphasis. The successes here have sometimes been to replace older treasury and
corporate banking systems. Temenos gained an early replacement of Misys’ Midas, for
instance, in 2000 at Arab Malaysian Bank. A major deal that spanned both wholesale
and treasury in that year was from the Construction Bank of China. The global contract
was for Globus to be installed initially in Johannesburg to cover FX, MM, trade finance
and securities. The following year, a notable win came at the MKB, the Hungarian
Foreign Trade Bank. The bank was one of a clutches of users of the Winter Partners-
derived IBS-90 and, indeed, was the first to take it back in the first half of the 1990s. The
hope for Temenos was that, where one IBS-90 user had led, others might follow, but as
mentioned elsewhere, the bank had a difficult project.
Other treasury-related deals at around this time came from BRE in Poland and Nova
Ljubljanska Banka in Slovenia. The latter used Bancs on the retail side but opted for a
separate treasury solution.
At the front-end for treasury, in mid-2001, Temenos acquired a small front office system
supplier, Alphametrics. However, much more recently, the third-party component that
has contributed here was derived from the acquisition of Financial Objects.

Active bank Treasury was initially meant to go the way of the Financial Objects’ other
systems, IBIS and Activebank Retail, into oblivion. However, Activebank Treasury
became integrated with T24 and reborn as Treasury Trader. A key customer is the
Commercial Bank of Africa, which acted as the pilot site for a bi-directional interface.
The offering should be suitable for the treasury front-end requirements of retail and
universal banks, said Temenos’ treasury product manager, David Helps, and it is mainly
positioned for tier three and four banks. As well as FX and MM, it covers vanilla
derivatives and structured products.
Active bank Treasury had a small number of customers, and Temenos analysed its
capabilities. It was built for Financial Objects by a third party, Hal Hovland, who had built
several other such dealing front ends.
From Commercial Bank of Africa’s perspective, having selected T24 in July 2007 as an
enterprise solution, one of the gaps identified at the close of the project was for the front
office, said the bank’s assistant general manager, enterprise programmes management,
Eric Muriuki Njagi. Almost any type of deal could be captured, but there was none of the
decision-making ahead of this, he said.
Commercial Bank of Africa is the largest private bank in Kenya and had been broadening
its activities, including into the SME and mass affluent markets, as well as planning
moves into five countries, starting with Tanzania. It was seeking STP for any deals,
regardless of where they originate; workflow management to control the risk; the ability
to view positions from different perspectives; limit management; pre-trade analysis;
structured product development, with some customers asking for this; and consistent
accounting between the treasury department and finance.
The initial aim, in early 2008, was to satisfy these needs using the T24 modules, but this
proved challenging and beyond the scope of T24, said Njagi. Temenos also
acknowledged that there was a gap and that it was in its interests to close this, he said,
‘so it worked out well’.
The Activebank platform seemed to have 85 per cent of what the bank needed. It was
also felt to be faster to interface it with the back office than if a third-party system had
been chosen, and there was a clear roadmap for this, said Njagi. Commercial Bank of
Africa was quite happy with its relationship with Temenos and was pleased not to have
to deal with two different vendors.
The development and customisation started in April 2010, with the requirements
specification completed in May. Testing and deployment followed, then the full
interface. Commercial Bank of Africa’s Tanzanian operation was intended to be brought
online in March 2011. This operation was supported by T24 in Kenya, as would be the

case for subsequent countries, with the aim of having as little hardware as possible in
the foreign operations. That two-way interface became commercially available in Q4
2010.
For transaction banking, Temenos is keen to emphasise its capabilities, particularly
since the arrival of the new payment’s component. It would like to compete in the
syndicated lending space against the specialist systems, so too in the trade finance and
cash management sectors, but with the ability to use the system to support more than
one of these areas within a bank, thereby allowing a rationalisation of systems. And, after
all, transaction banking is back in vogue given its solid, fee-based nature.
Other Applications History
A front-end layer, ARC, has been featured heavily. It was initially meant to span CRM and
internet banking. With an initial launch in mid-2006, ARC stood for ‘acquire, retain and
cross-sell’. It was aimed at retail, universal, and private banking users, bringing CRM-
type support. An extension of ARC to replace Temenos’ old internet banking front-end
followed soon after. Kenya Commercial Bank, a notable signing for T24 in the second
quarter of 2007, was an early taker of ARC CRM.
Previous early users of Temenos ‘e-Globus’, in 2000, had been BankBoston International
in Miami for its Latin American private banking business; EFG Bank in Luxembourg;
Lloyds TSB in the Channel Islands, also in a private banking capacity; and Allied Irish
Bank’s treasury services operation in Dublin. By the end of the year, Lloyds TSB was live,
initially with enquiry facilities and then for buying and selling stocks. AIB and EFG Bank
were also live with enquiry facilities. Dresdner Lateinamerika followed, for Hamburg.
BNG in the Netherlands also set about implementing the internet layer, along with
Globus as a whole, with a live date scheduled for 2001.
By 2005, the supplier’s internet banking solution was being used by several customers.
‘Cheap and cheerful’ was how long-standing user Ian Cookson, executive committee
member, EFG Bank, described it in mid-2005 (the bank had recently replaced it with a
solution from Broadvision). At this time, Temenos’ chief technology officer, Andre
Loustau, promised a ‘technology refresh’ to embrace web services.
ARC was essentially the next generation. The aim was to provide banks with full and
integrated front-to-back-office functionality. By the end of 2007, Temenos was claiming
twelve deals for ARC Internet Banking and ten for ARC CRM. ARC had ‘vastly exceeded
our targets in terms of sales’, said group director, banking services, Mark Gunning,
particularly for the internet component. He admitted that there was ‘nervousness’ within
Temenos about the internet offering, and the company had armed its sales staff with
answers should objections arise. This was because the offering provided access directly

into T24, with no separate channel layer in between, but the concerns were unfounded.
A key benefit was agility, he said, with changes made in the back office immediately
reflected in the internet front-end.
Eleven additional ARC clients were added in Q2 2008, taking the total to 42. Only two
per cent of Temenos’ T24/Globus clients had this solution, so there was felt to be plenty
of potentials. That potential appeared to be being realised. In 2009, there were 23
additional ARC sales and, with the acquired business intelligence offering, Insight, it
contributed ten per cent of total licences.
ARC Internet Banking went live at Metro Bank in the UK soon after this bank opened its
doors for business in 2010. By this stage, Deutsche Bank was also live. For corporate
banking, Temenos added the ability to upload bulk payment files and work was done to
enhance the trade finance front-end support as well.
Moreover, by May 2012, it seemed Metro Bank was already set to replace ARC Internet
Banking. This was because it was not happy with the system’s performance, according
to a source at the annual Temenos Client Forum (TCF) event in Barcelona. The source
claimed that ARC Internet Banking was to be replaced with the multi-channel banking
offering from a UK-based vendor, Edge IPK.
Temenos then acquired a mobile banking application, UK-based FE-Mobile, in May
2010. Founded in 2002, FE-Mobile was a strategic partner of Temenos from 2007 up to
the acquisition. As well as Temenos, FE-Mobile had also partnered with Misys. It claimed
several users of its Securelink product, including banks in Angola, Portugal, Tanzania,
the UK, Pakistan, and one each in West Africa and South America. ‘Some of them are just
now getting to the point where they are launching,’ said Phil Sorrell, the former co-
founder and CEO of FE-Mobile, who became business development director for mobile
channels at Temenos (he left Temenos in 2013).
Temenos committed to an investment programme in FE-Mobile’s products. By mid-
2011, Temenos was able to demonstrate an ARC Mobile app on Microsoft’s smartphone
platform, as well as on Android and iPhone. The first bank to go live with what was now
ARC Mobile was Unibank in Ghana in the first half of 2011. Ficohsa in Honduras, which
had been implementing T24 since 2008, also went live with ARC Mobile before
completing its core implementation, with ARC Mobile connected to its legacy solutions.
Temenos then bought Edge IPK in 2012, the supplier that was replacing ARC at Metro
Bank. Edge IPK’s product would now be combined with the ARC front-end products to
create Temenos Connect. Edge IPK brought a ‘user experience platform’ (UXP) –
Edgeconnect – for developing multi-channel business applications. Edgeconnect was
clearly the foundation for Temenos’ combined offering, regardless of statements about

taking the best of this and ARC. Edge IPK came with a customer base of well-known
financial institutions, among them ABN Amro, Deutsche Bank, RBS, and Zurich Financial
Services.
So it was that Edgeconnect has come to form the basis of the Temenos Connect
offering, an omnichannel banking solution aimed at banks of all sizes and in all
geographies. ‘With this offering, we can really compete in the European banking space,
particularly in the sophisticated Scandinavian markets,’ observed Robert Burch,
Temenos’ product director, channels, at the time (he left Temenos in early 2014). ARC
wasn’t ‘really suitable’, he admitted.
As well as supporting customer channels, Temenos Connect is meant to be applicable
internally as the T24 browser replacement. The proof of concept for this had been
completed for the relationship manager tablet (iPad), as well as the ‘mash-up on the
services side for T24, [Odyssey-derived] Triple-A, Wealthmanager and [business
intelligence] Insight products. The vendor used its TCF 2013 event to demo these to its
key customers and gather feedback, to prioritise and identify ‘what we should be doing
next’, said Burch. Their input suggested that the priorities currently lay in relationship
management for wealth, T24 browser replacement, and teller application.
On the external use, the development of a Model Bank for Temenos Connect was
underway. The first delivery for this was to cover the existing functionality of ARC
Internet Banking. The retail part was apparently almost finished by spring 2013, while
corporate and wealth management should be ready by September, said Burch. Three
banks were in pilot, with Nordea Bank in Luxembourg among them (Nordea was the
poster child for TCF’s wealth management theme, as it was implementing the latest
versions of Triple A Plus, alongside T24 and Temenos Connect).
Client onboarding was also in the pipeline, although the development had been paused,
as the bank that was engaged in the venture had delayed its project. Metro Bank was by
now in the UAT phase with Edgeconnect/Temenos Connect, with go-live anticipated in
June. As stated, Metro Bank initially took ARC Internet Banking, alongside the T24 core
system and ARC Mobile, but subsequently opted for Edge IPK’s offering. The
implementation at Metro Bank was ‘very complex’, as it predated model bank and
covered much wider functionality than ARC Internet Banking, said Burch. ‘It is more of a
project on top of ARC Internet Banking, rather than Temenos Connect Model Bank,
although the architecture is the same as Temenos Connect.’ ARC Internet Banking
would continue to support corporate banking at Metro Bank, while retail would move to
Temenos Connect. ‘Other implementations will be easier,’ he assured.

As for other ARC Internet Banking takers, each roadmap would be examined on a case-
by-case basis, and should they wish to remain on the existing system, Temenos would
support them indefinitely. However, there would be no extension of functionality. The
expectation was that most would choose to upgrade to Temenos Connect, noted Burch.
ARC Mobile, however, was a ‘more complex issue’. It wasn’t originally a Temenos
product, as it came from FE-Mobile. ‘We are now offering the option of connecting ARC
Mobile – which is now called Temenos Connect Mobile – through the integration layer so
that the integration with a bank’s back-end systems is common with its internet banking.
This means that you have to integrate only once, so it enforces consistency,’ Burch
explained. ‘The presentation layer is different, so the administration side of functionality
will remain separate now. And that gives a bank capability of working with all types of
mobile phones.’ But for the developed markets that are interested only in smartphones,
the Edgeconnect-based Temenos Connect would be offered.
There are also the offerings of wealth management systems supplier Odyssey Financial
Technologies, which was bought for $101.3 million in October 2010, Temenos’ largest
acquisition to date. The Odyssey price tag included $20.3 million of debt, and it
appeared that the long-standing vendor had been struggling of late, reflected in a
reduction in headcount from almost 600 to around 420. Odyssey’s shares were held by
its management team (notably by Antoine Duchateau, the company’s co-founder, and
chairman), and its funds were managed by Apax Partners, a French private equity firm.
The combined wealth management business was expected to generate pro-forma
annual revenues of around $130 million ($75 million of which would be Odyssey-derived)
in 2010, which would make the unified entity ‘the largest wealth management vendor’.
This figure represented a quarter of Temenos’ total revenues.
Odyssey’s main front and middle office software were Triple-A, a portfolio management
system with some relationship management and CRM capabilities, which had around 70
users, mainly in Europe. Much newer was Wealth manager, a desktop application gained
via Odyssey’s acquisition in 2008 of Canada-based Xeye and particularly strong in CRM.
It was aimed at wealth management advisors.
Temenos stated that the Odyssey offerings would be combined with T24 to create a
complete front-to-back system for wealth/asset managers and private banks. It was
known from the due diligence report, which had been seen by IBS, that one option under
consideration was to replace both Triple-A and Wealth managers with enhanced T24
functionality and a gradual withdrawal of the Odyssey products. Retaining each product
would incur a lot of investment and many thousands of man-days of development. If
adopted, it seemed such a transition would only happen over several years, with
Temenos selling both Odyssey products ahead of this. Another option was to retain the
Wealth manager as the front-end to T24, in place of T24’s existing asset management

functionality. Either way, a shift of development to Temenos’ Chennai centre was on the
cards.
There was some overlap with ARC, and this issue would be addressed in due course,
said Chuard, but for now, the solutions would continue to be included in the Temenos
product line. They would provide a great cross-selling opportunity, he hoped. Only two
of Odyssey’s customers had Temenos’ back-office system: EFG and Commerzbank’s
private banking and wealth management arm, both in Luxembourg. There was also a
third site where the implementation plans were in place, but the work had not started yet
(this might have been a reference to ABN Amro).
EFG and Commerzbank provided Temenos with the ready interfaces between T24 and
Odyssey’s products, but ‘in time there will be much tighter integration’ resulting in one
combined offering, said Chuard. The wealth manager used Oracle but also some IBM
technology.
By TCF 2011, the stated aim had become to eventually move towards a best-of-breed
approach from the three products, although there would be intermediate steps to this.
An interface was under way between T24 and Triple A. Interfaces for a Wealth manager,
to T24 or Triple-A, would be built on request. Temenos claimed that the technology
roadmap for these products had accelerated due to the extra investment capability that
it could bring compared to Odyssey. Odyssey had apparently previously attempted a
componentisation project but was unable to complete it.
Five hundred people, or about one in seven, within Temenos were now dedicated to
private banking. There was now a private wealth division within Temenos, with its own
dedicated sales operation.
A few new deals were closed in the six months after Odyssey was acquired. These
included Bankhaus Main in Germany for Triple-A and First Hawaiian Bank and Gluskin
Sheff in North America for a Wealth manager. With regards to the opportunities for
cross-selling, Temenos estimated that half of ERI’s Olympic user base were Odyssey
customers.
Temenos’ private banking division now had 150 clients in 125 countries, and there were
specific geographies where the Odyssey acquisition would strengthen Temenos’ market
position. Hong Kong and China were given as examples, so too North America.
Temenos was also seeking, over two years, to move Triple-A to databases other than
Sybase. Pierre Bouquieaux, the vendor’s product director wealth, said the Triple-A
functionality was ‘already quite rich’, so no significant developments were anticipated in
this area, so the team was concentrating on ‘the improvement of usability’. The shift of

database was still planned in early 2015, with the target being Oracle. There was
apparently a client commitment for this, so it looked as though it might finally happen.
Wrapping up the add-on applications, Temenos has changed tack of late on risk
management, somewhat mirroring what has been going on with ARC. Temenos
announced in 2012 that it was stopping the development of its previous product in this
area, T-Risk, which it had acquired in 2006 with a company called TLC Risk. The way
forward would now be based on the Insight tool, which stemmed from Temenos’
acquisition of Lydian Associates in 2008, and another acquisition, of Primisyn in Canada,
in 2011 (the latter’s user base was made up of Canadian credit unions).
Shawn Doumy, product director of what was now called Insight Risk Intelligence, said T-
Risk users would have to be on Insight Risk from 2013. T-Risk users were thought to
include CMMB, a securities firm which in mid-2007 was the first to take the product as
part of a T24 implementation, and Cyprus-based USB Bank (formerly Universal Bank),
which took it before TLC Risk was acquired by Temenos. Other banks linked with the T-
Risk system included Meezan Bank, Bank of Georgia, and National Bank of Malawi. The
sunsetting of T-Risk appeared to have some potential to cause consternation in the user
base, with some users questioning why they would want to upgrade. Doumy pointed out
that Insight Risk had newer modules, such as for asset and liability management.
There were apparently around 30 Connect takers by February 2015. Metro Bank was
apparently live, and so too a client in Asia. Gunning admitted that, in the past, there had
been quite a gap between the number of takers of ARC Internet Banking (and Insight, for
that matter) and actual go-lives. The components tended to be taken during the
selection as they were expected to be needed at some point, but often this did not
happen as the banks became purely focused on their core projects.
Componentisation: As well as the ‘satellite’ applications, Temenos has been seeking to
overhaul the core system once more, this time with an emphasis on breaking it down
into component parts. This is meant to allow Temenos to deliver portions of T24 to co-
exist with a bank’s existing infrastructure. This is particularly with the needs of tier one
banks in mind, with an understandable belief that they will take a phased approach to
systems transformation rather than a rip and replace one, although the challenge of
breaking up a long-standing, monolithic Core Banking system shouldn’t be
underestimated.
Other suppliers have paid lip service to such a stance, but as is the Temenos way, the
company has thrown a lot of R&D behind the strategy. At TCF in Berlin in June 2010,
Temenos’ Loustau said the ‘full componentisation of the system’ should ease the
implementation and integration. ‘We want to de-risk the implementation of Core

Banking systems, which admittedly is a very lofty goal.’ He claimed improvements of late
(the company claimed a record 98 go-lives in 2009), but delivery has clearly been a
problem area for Temenos.
A product factory, the Arrangement Architecture (AA), was part of the remedy, breaking
down financial products into components. It is meant to see a move away from silos and
modules towards a single point for designing, manufacturing and cataloguing products.
Within R10, Temenos claimed to have done this for term deposits to add to work that
had been done for lending for R9. North Shore Credit Union in Canada was cited as a
pilot site for some of these capabilities.
In R11, componentisation was planned for demand account processing and product
bundling. The first focus for the latter was to be offset mortgages and then interest
pools. Also planned was customer level pricing. Temenos introduced its own workflow
and process engines, although users could take third party equivalents. A real-time
decision engine was intended for R12, which would allow banks to react to customer
events via staff interaction at the branch or call centre or via automated prompts from
other channels.
The componentisation of T24 has been in parallel with the release of T24 Enterprise
(T24E), the Java-based version of T24 that Temenos had been working on with IBM,
initially for the mainframe. The two suppliers believed that components combined with
the IBM technology stack would play well in the tier one and two markets.
Componentisation was ‘not for the faint-hearted’, said Loustau, at the unveiling of T24E
at the 2011 TCF. But he claimed T24E was five per cent faster than the C version in lab
testing, with further benefits expected from ongoing tuning. As it can offload work onto
low-cost processors, Loustau claimed that T24E could also deliver savings. The next
component would be accounting. Currency and charges components would follow.
Hypo Alpe Adria Bank has been something of a pioneer with Temenos’ component
strategy and, predictably, has the scars to show for this. It was the first to take the new
AA component. The first cutover in Montenegro, was fraught with problems, but a
second one for Herzegovina went much smoother. The project then moved on to Bosnia,
Montenegro, and Serbia.
The local requirements for interest calculation and accounting processes, together with
other high customisation efforts, soon became apparent in the bank’s T24 project. While
the bank had separate in-house built general ledger and reporting systems, which could
handle the country specifics, the existing Loans and Deposits module of T24 could not.
Attention turned to the emerging AA, allowing banks to define new product facilities
such as interest rates and eligibility rules. This looked as though it would provide the

flexibility to support the local requirements and accounting processes through the
ability to define new products and workflows quickly and easily by configuring existing
product components rather than needing to start from scratch every time.
Ernst Fanzott, director at the bank’s IT Shared Service Centre in Belgrade – ZIS –
inherited the project and admitted that he was not sure that AA was the right decision at
that point in time. It had subsequently become a strategic component of T24 and
offered high flexibility. However, the bank was already a pioneer by virtue of taking the
IBM DB2 version of T24 (linked to ZIS’s traditional IBM slant and expertise). Using AA, a
brand-new product that had not previously been deployed, was an additional risk.
The bank started to implement Release 8 of T24, including AA. The latter proved to be a
‘beta version’ and should not have been released, in Fanzott’s opinion. The DB2 driver
also caused problems, and these were the two main obstacles, although the latter was
resolved in two to three months. As mentioned, Nova Ljubljanska Banka in Slovenia had
the DB2 version, and it seemed stable, but Fanzott believed this bank was the only one
live with the IBM database version of T24 at this stage. More generally, as other users
have observed, he believed T24 did not make full use of a relational database due to its
original design.
AA with Release 8 gradually improved but was still not completely reliable, said Fanzott
in early 2012, and was the cause of most of the issues that the bank still faced at this
time. Some of the anomalies of the market were ultimately solved with inexpensive and
simple fixes but identifying the requirements often took far longer. The go-live itself was
painful, with lots of issues and long hours to counter this. Fortunately, the next
implementation was much smoother. It was for Release 10 and AA for Herzegovina.
Another bank to have problems with AA was Laiki Bank, which was implementing T24
Release 10 for Cyprus in 2011 and into 2012. It had experienced a troubled couple of first
phases, for customer information and savings, ahead of a planned major cutover for the
rest of its business - 80 per cent - in February 2013. There had also been performance
issues, which saw the bank select a third-party performance testing tool from The Core
Banking Group (in preference to Temenos’ own tool, T-Verify) to try to overcome these
for the final major phase. In fact, Laiki Bank was forced to merge with the Bank of Cyprus
in 2013 because of the island’s financial crisis, with the latter’s Misys Equation system
chosen to support the combined entity. It was the end of a long and inglorious episode at
Laiki, following a selection in 2007, with early phases dogged by performance and
scalability issues, in part blamed by the bank on the jBase database.
Platform Optimisation: The emphasis was now on T24 becoming the leading application
for each of the three major technology stacks of IBM, Microsoft, and Oracle. ‘You will see

us over the years building out components that enhance the customer experience and
the operation within the stack,’ said Andreades, at the 2011 TCF. Within this context
could be seen many of the product announcements made during the forum.
By 2007, the database options were clear in that, of new clients, 42 per cent that year
took T24 on Oracle, 48 per cent on jBase, eight per cent Microsoft SQL Server and two
per cent IBM DB2 (Banque Raiffeisen in Luxembourg – not to be confused with the
larger Raiffeisen group – took the latter). The port to SQL Server was largely done to give
a public statement of openness, said Gunning, although there had been a possible first
client in mind. However, this version had been much more popular than expected.
Recruits in a previous couple of years included North Shore Credit Union in Canada,
Investec Australia and Glitnir. The takers tended to be physically relatively small, but the
uptake showed that customers were happy to use SQL Server for their Core Banking
systems, said Gunning. Cost and in-house expertise was the driver in at least one
instance; one wanted ‘anything but Oracle’; and there was also some indifference, with
customers not really bothered which database they took, so long as it worked.
Temenos had voiced its frustration with IBM in the past, but there had been big
improvements with DB2, said Gunning, in 2008, and the two companies would work to
‘encourage’ greater DB2 uptake. He said he would like to see eight per cent Microsoft,
eight per cent IBM for the year. However, an IBM iSeries version of T24, promised off and
on over the previous few years, no longer featured in Temenos’ plans and, indeed,
Gunning said that a couple of users (one of which was Turkish Bank in London) would be
moving away from the platform. There was no demand from the market, he said, even
among users with existing iSeries-based systems.
Currently, it was working on the third phase of ‘Temenos Web Services’. Temenos had
defined 1200 services by March 2008, and its SOA work was one reason for a win the
previous year at Banque Libano-Française (BLF) in Lebanon, said Gunning. However,
those services had proved quite difficult to use, so the emphasis was now on ‘building
real business services rather than exposing everything we do’. The expectation was that
retail banking would be the priority and that delivery would be in Release 9, albeit with
pilots before then.
In fact, BLF had been having a tough time. It had embarked on an innovative project to
fuse T24 with Oracle components. This was part of an ambitious technology
modernisation project, with a three-year phased migration plan to cover its domestic
operations as well as branches in France, Switzerland, and Cyprus. It was the first bank
to attempt to closely integrate T24 with Oracle’s Business Process Execution Language
(BPEL) engine, Fusion workflow engine and middleware, Business Activity Monitor
(BAM), data warehouse, CRM, and ERP applications. However, the project ran hugely

late. The focus ended up solely on the bank’s domestic operations, where it had a
network of around 50 branches and outlets, and cutover to T24 came in August 2013, six
years after the start, after which the work moved on to the Oracle components.
On the SOA front, Temenos was a notable addition to SAP’s collaborative efforts at the
end of April 2008. At this time, SAP fulfilled its promise to turn its Industry Value
Network (IVN) into an independent body. The replacement, the Banking Industry
Architecture Network (BIAN), was launched at a meeting in Frankfurt and saw the
notable addition of Microsoft as well as Temenos. The new body is financed by its
members (eight financial institutions, five suppliers and four services companies at the
outset), and all output is intended to be freely available. That output is centred on the
definition of services for the banking sector to fit within an SOA model. BIAN was meant
to build on the work done within the IVN, and the first available output was scheduled for
the third quarter of the year.
On the database front, Temenos has been gradually phasing out its own jBase, with this
component a cause of some criticism from users (long-standing Globus/T24 user, Nova
Ljubljanska Banka in Slovenia, jettisoned jBase in favour of DB2 within a major upgrade
to R8, for instance). Temenos would not cease support for jBase, said Gunning at TCF
2012, but it was no longer actively sold. This came as something of a shock to users,
particularly those that had recently implemented – or was mid-implementation - of the
jBase version of T24.
Prior to the merger with Bank of Cyprus, Laiki Bank had been implementing R10 of T24
on IBM’s AIX Unix and ‘unfortunately’ with jBase, said Theodora Papa, head of banking
systems IT at the bank. This database was one cause of the performance problems in
the bank’s first two phases. The announcement that jBase would be discontinued came
as ‘a big shock’, she said. The bank’s selection was four or five years earlier, at which
time jBase was bundled as part of the overall solution, and there were assurances from
Temenos that it would not be a problem. As the bank was now mid-project, it would be
pressing on with the jBase version. If stress testing showed that jBase could not handle
the volumes, then the bank might need to consider Oracle or DB2, said George
Charalambous, Laiki’s IT contracts officer.
For Oracle, this supplier’s technology team remained very enthusiastic, said Gunning.
Andreades pointed to Oracle bringing leads to Temenos and statements in its own
collateral about the strength of T24. One reason for the support, he said, was that if
Oracle won a deal for its own system, Flexcube, then it would clearly gain the database
decision, but this was not guaranteed with T24 sales, so there was a good reason to be
supportive. Between 50 and 60 per cent of T24 sales were on Oracle by 2010. Flexcube
was still the number one competitor, said Andreades, ‘but I-flex was a more important
competitor pre-acquisition than post-acquisition.

A lot of emphases was being placed on the partnership with Microsoft, and there had
been an acceleration of the adoption of the SQL and Windows versions of T24.
Reflecting on this, Microsoft had set up a T24 competency centre in its UK labs.
‘Microsoft has made a real effort to provide technology, support and expertise,’
Andreades had said at TCF 2010. He pointed out that Temenos was one of only five
global partner ISVs and the only one in Core Banking. The relationship had included
Microsoft sharing 1400 named accounts in the banking sector with Temenos. ‘You can
run some big banks on Microsoft and T24,’ said Andreades. He pointed to the previous
year’s deal from Microsoft advocate, Bank SinoPac, in Taiwan, which had six million
customers. In Sinopac’s case, it was claimed that a 50 per cent reduction in hardware
and software maintenance costs was achieved by implementing T24 on Microsoft. The
combination had also done well in Canada; he pointed out. Temenos was also talking to
Microsoft about the possibility of incorporating the latter’s Dynamic CRM offering as a
front-end to its own ARC CRM platform. And Temenos was planning to harness
Microsoft’s Sharepoint for collaboration capabilities and to provide tighter integration
with Office.
Temenos saw increasing uptake of both the Microsoft and Oracle versions of T24, said
Andreades. At the same time, for IBM, the z Series and DB2 version of T24 could be a
‘very credible upgrade path’ for tier one and two banks with existing mainframe
environments.
By the 2011 TCF, for the Oracle stack, benchmark results were released for the Exadata
database machine, with Temenos promising to start offering a pre-configured version of
T24, as well as the hardware itself to prospects. For Microsoft, Temenos claimed that six
customers were now running T24 on the Azure cloud (all microfinance institutions in
Mexico) and also demonstrated live its new ARC Mobile offering on a smartphone with
the Microsoft operating system, Windows Mobile.
Since then, Temenos has pressed on with Azure so that by May 2013, several other
customers were live (including a couple in Africa, Renaissance Credit in Nigeria and
Fountain Credit Services in Kenya). There were talks of new contracts for this offering
now being finalised in Asia, one being Amret Microfinance in Cambodia, although this
ultimately went with a traditional in-house IBM AIX and jBase platform, not cloud. It was
somewhat confusing that Amret Microfinance took the jBase version of T24 after
Temenos’ announcement that it would no longer proactively sell jBase (there were other
jBase bids at around this time as well).
For IBM, the componentisation of T24, with the release of T24E, was a prominent
message. Oracle had ‘essentially abandoned the mainframe strategy’, said Andreades.
‘Maybe as a vendor community over the last ten to 20 years, we haven’t done a great job

of addressing the needs of large banks in terms of gradual renewal.’ Such banks were
now facing ‘fundamental issues’, but ‘we believe the technology is getting to the point
where it starts being credible’. As well as improvements in technology, he felt that
allowing a customer to split a large project into separate pieces would encourage banks
from a capital expenditure perspective, making the commitment more manageable.
Temenos’ relationship with IBM was managed by Bob Berini, who joined Temenos in
2010, having worked at IBM for 30 years. ‘All the other players in the tier one space
already had System z offerings, but not in native mode,’ he said. T24E is native to IBM’s
Websphere application server. Berini saw latent demand which had been postponed
since the banking crisis. Initially, signing one or two accounts would be a ‘home run’.
Berini left Temenos in December 2012, just two years into the job.
There was a tender under way at this time (2010/11) at BNP Paribas, which was seen
within Temenos as one of the largest ever RFPs. The bank was looking for customer
account management software, an initial area of focus for componentisation. Temenos
was shortlisted with Callataÿ & Wouters, which had an existing relationship with the bank
based on Thaler running on the z/OS mainframe, and Infosys. Later in the year, BNP
Paribas went with Callataÿ & Wouters (now Sopra).
At the start of 2015, Gunning said Temenos no longer viewed what was T24E as
separate, with a standard architecture for the smallest to largest banks.
In January 2015, the non-banking part of the jBase business was sold by Temenos to US-
based cloud computing specialist, Zumasys. By this time, Gunning said that jBase was
categorically no longer sold by Temenos with T24 but that it had taken a while to die
because salespeople kept selling it from time to time because they liked it. This was
despite it being removed from Temenos’ price list two years before. Even if Temenos
announced it was going to discontinue support for the jBase version, said Gunning,
which it hadn’t by the start of 2015, it would still effectively be five years from that date
before support for jBase releases would end.
By this stage, the breakdown of database usage within the T24 base was roughly 140
with Oracle, 70 with SQL, ten with DB2 and the rest on jBase. As SQL had started three or
four years later than Oracle, the figures showed the relative popularity of the Microsoft
option. All SaaS deals to date were on SQL.
An additional benefit of components will hopefully be the ability to test portions of T24
when there are any bug fixes or other changes without testing the whole. This would also
aid Temenos’ own internal testing and should ease upgrades, said Gunning. AA was
‘built perfectly’ for this sort of scenario, he added.

Sales History
In parallel with all the new-name business, there have been plenty of old users trying to
move to T24. Some of these have been large projects. For instance, the United Bulgarian
Bank and its parent, National Bank of Greece (one of the earliest takers of T24 after its
release in 2003), had experienced a major project. Nadejda Vladimirova, head of the T24
competence centre at National Bank of Greece, said that, since 2007, the plan had been
to move all countries outside of Greece and Turkey onto the same operational model of
T24, hosted in Athens. Between 2008 and 2011, banks in seven different countries,
spreading across more than 20 legacy systems and 3000 products and services, were
migrated onto T24.
This project started in Serbia at Vojvodjanska Bank in 2007, which had 118 branches and
more than two million customers, with this country project being finished in 2009.
Implementations followed in Romania, Egypt, Albania, Macedonia, the UK and Bulgaria.
The Romanian project at Banca Romaneasca, saw three legacy systems replaced by
November 2010. As for United Bulgarian Bank, it had used Globus since 2003 (having
previously run Misys’ Equation) and moved to T24 by September 2011.
Temenos’ 2009 and 2010 haul of new-name deals stood up well. Indeed, in two difficult
years, it showed more resilience from this perspective than most others. The 2009 tally
showed no tailing off, coming in at 40, which was precisely the total for 2008. It was a
good return in a clearly depressed market and put Temenos a fair way ahead of Oracle
FSS, which saw Flexcube sales slump from 39 in 2008 to 33 in 2009. Of Temenos’ 2009
sales, 30 per cent were in Africa, 25 per cent in Central and South-East Asia, 15 per cent
in Western Europe, twelve and a half per cent in the Asia Pacific, seven and a half per
cent in the Middle East, and single deals in Central and Eastern Europe, Central and Latin
America (a solitary Mexican taker and a considerable change from previous years),
North America, and Australasia.
In total, new name deals for 2010 came in at 39, so only a small dip on the previous few
years, although it looked as though there were few high-end wins again. The focused
lending deal at Danske Bank appeared to be at the higher end, so too that at LBBW.
Temenos had one deal in China, Xiamen International Bank (TCS led the way here in
2010 with four).
In some ways, it was not a surprise that Temenos could not maintain the momentum and
sustain the relentless quest for new business in 2011. It had 27 new-name deals. The
downturn was reflected in its financial results, particularly a slump in Q4 licence revenue.
In the IBS Sales League Table, it was pipped by one by Oracle FSS.

This was the year of Dubois when a stated focus had been on getting customers live, but
normal service was resumed in 2012 in terms of sales. It recorded 34 new name deals
and pulled well ahead of Oracle FSS. However, there was no escaping the low-end,
geographically diverse nature of Temenos’ 2012 haul. It won a couple in its Canadian
stronghold, plus an international operation in the US. One small international operation
in Mexico was the complete haul for Central and South America, bar one in the
Caribbean. In the Middle East, there was a much-publicised signing with Jordan Ahli
Bank and a couple of others in the Middle East, but the biggest gains were in Africa
(nine) and Asia/Asia Pacific (ten).
In 2013, Temenos kept up the quantity of new name deals so that it topped the IBS Sales
League Table by some distance, with 35 wins for T24. However, the year was not without
setbacks for Temenos in general. There was the Scoban/Hampden & Co reversal, and it
lost another of the Actis user base in Germany when Misr Bank Europe (a corporate
bank) moved to a rival system from Pass Consulting, complaining it had been ‘forced’ to
leave Actis’ Paba/Q system by Temenos. Temenos also appeared to be steadily
haemorrhaging customers from the acquired Viveo user base in French-speaking
countries. The latest to go in 2013 was Banque Delubac in France (a private investment
bank) and Banque de Développement Local in Algeria (BDL, a state-owned universal
bank), both to SAB. Bank of China in France followed, cutting over to SAB’s system in
late 2014.
At face value, Temenos again weathered the storm better than most in 2013. It
maintained reasonable financial results (including a recently announced four per cent
increase in revenues for 2013 and guidance of a five to ten per cent increase in revenues
for 2015 and ten to 15 per cent for software licensing). The downside was again the size
and far-flung nature of its T24 successes. Everyone was in tier three or, mostly, tier four
category. There were no multi-site deals. It looked as though the increase in licence
revenues stemmed in part from sales of other applications and renewal agreements (it
shouldn’t be forgotten that Temenos started to switch from perpetual licences to ten-
year ones around 2003-2005).
That ten-year model has started to interest analysts as, clearly, the renewals should now
be having an impact. In fact, it isn’t nearly as clear cut as expecting all the new-name
signings from 2005 to be renewing in 2015.
The win at Banesco in Venezuela and State Bank of Vietnam in early 2014 seemed to
bode well for the year, and Temenos once more benefited from relative stability. Its
financials remained steady, and there were seemingly no choppy waters. It has the
challenge of turning its Trinovus acquisition in the US into a success, it still battles with
delivery, and it is also reworking its channels offerings, as it seeks to crack this part of

the market after previous attempts. And at the end of the day, T24, which has served the
market so well and has had so much R&D, is not getting any younger, although it
benefits from the lack of new generation challengers.
Euro Pacific Bank, a small offshore investment bank based in St Vincent and the
Grenadines, reached a decision on new banking software. The bank signed for Temenos’
T24 Core Banking system, including the AML component, provided on a Software-as-a-
Service (SaaS) basis. It is hosted in Microsoft’s Azure Europe environment. The deal was
won against Temenos’ frequent contestant in the private banking software space, ERI,
and its Olympic core system.
In the year 2014, Temenos had one of its three Islamic deals for T24 in Yemen, at Enjaz
Capital, and another in Iraq. Inter-national Turnkey Systems (ITS) had two of its four
Islamic Ethix successes in Libya, at Assaray Trade & Investment Bank and United Bank
for Commerce & Investment. Although Temenos did not win many new selections in
2014, additional sales to existing customers meant it was not far off a similar
performance to previous years.
Switzerland-based private banking group, Julius Baer, concluded its lengthy selection
process to find a new Core Banking solution to harmonise its operations worldwide. The
winner being Temenos and its T24 offering, beating rival Avaloq to the deal at the final
stage. The news was greeted cheerfully by Temenos’ shareholders, following the
disappointing Q4 revenue figures. Julius Baer then embarked on a separate search for
an implementation partner.
DNB Luxembourg, a private banking subsidiary of the major Norwegian banking group,
DNB, signed for Temenos’ T24 Core Banking system and Temenos Connect for digital
channels. The contract was signed, and the initial gap analysis was completed. The
implementation work will be carried out by Temenos’ local partner, Syncordis.
Temenos landed one of its largest-ever deals with Nordea. The vendor was selected in
2015 to provide its T24 Core Banking system to standardise operations across the
group. Accenture was picked as the integration partner.
Sagicor Bank Jamaica went live with Temenos’ T24 Core Banking system. At the front-
end, the bank rolled out the Netteller omnichannel banking platform supplied by Netinfo.
The bank signed for Temenos’ T24 Core Banking system in Q2 2014. The acquired
operation has already been a long-standing user of T24 (as part of a multisite roll-out
across the regional operations of RBC).

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IBS Intelligence Q1 2022.pdf