Euromoney’s award for the world’s best core banking solution goes to Temenos, a global leader in banking technology serving over 1,000 financial institutions across 150 countries. In 2024, Temenos continued to push technology boundaries, embedding artificial intelligence throughout core banking processes.
According to Barb Morgan, Temenos’s chief product and technology officer, the future of AI is agentic: “We believe autonomous AI agents can supplement humans at banks. If you think of areas such as financial crime mitigation, fraud monitoring, compliance monitoring, payment repairs – these are heavily rules-based today, followed by an army of humans looking at false positives. This is an area we’re really focused on.”
Temenos has been rolling out AI-driven features within its platform to help banks boost efficiency and decision-making. One notable example is in financial crime compliance. Earlier this year, Temenos introduced an autonomous AI agent in its financial crime mitigation module to streamline anti-money laundering (AML) and fraud checks. At one European bank, this AI agent now closes about 20% of the bank’s false-positive alerts, and it has reduced the false-positive alert rate to about 2% (down from roughly 7% previously).
In practical terms, this significantly lowers the workload on compliance teams and allows them to focus on genuine threats. Temenos designed the AI to be fully transparent: every decision the system makes is logged and explainable, a crucial factor for auditors and regulators.
Temenos is also exploring generative AI to create “copilots” – AI assistants for bank staff. One example is the Temenos Product Manager Copilot, which can sift through large data sets and answer complex queries, potentially cutting the time to research a new banking product from weeks to minutes.
“If you are to launch a new banking product today, you need to know the underlying system. In our case, Temenos Core and the surroundings. You need to know the parameters, the regulatory challenges that are involved in, test the audience and do many other actions,” says Morgan.
“We’re changing the game with Temenos Product Manager Copilot. You can just simply chat with our product and say, for example, you’re launching an overdraft protection product. How many existing clients are in overdraft today? What are optimal parameters? What do I need to know?”
Global scale and continuous innovation
Temenos’s ability to innovate at scale was also crucial to its success. Its flagship system, Temenos Core, is used by banking giants and by smaller institutions alike – a testament to the platform’s versatility.
In 2024, a major focus was the continued investment in its cloud-native architecture. The latest release introduced full containerisation and even serverless computing options. This means a bank can deploy the core platform on any cloud or on-premises, scaling it easily as demand grows.
Temenos also modularised its core functions – breaking the system into components that can be updated independently. For example, a bank can upgrade the payments module without disturbing the rest of the system, making the traditionally painful upgrade process much smoother.
Recognising the need to evolve beyond product-led growth, the company is laser-focused on delivering exceptional customer experiences across every touchpoint
An API-first approach underpins these changes: Temenos opened hundreds of APIs and built a central API gateway to simplify integration with external systems. Whether plugging in a new mobile app or connecting to a national payments network, Temenos’s core is ready to interface with the broader banking ecosystem.
One of Barb’s priorities has been improving how easily clients can extend and update the platform. “Our 2024’s development work was largely about building that extensibility foundation to allow banks to differentiate themselves, customise their business model and be able to upgrade quickly and much more seamlessly”. New tools let banks customise the software without changing its core code, so they can adopt future upgrades with minimal friction.
Temenos has managed these technical advances while maintaining steady business growth. In 2024, the company reported strong financial performance, driven by more clients shifting to SaaS and subscription models. It also continues investing heavily in R&D.
Putting customers at the centre
Recognising the need to evolve beyond product-led growth, the company is laser-focused on delivering exceptional customer experiences across every touchpoint. A major change has been separating the care of existing customers from new sales.
“Our account managers do not sell new logos; they’re there to look at our accounts and see how those clients are deriving value from the software,” explains Will Moroney, Temenos’s chief revenue officer. “Dealing with a career account manager who puts customer satisfaction at the centre, as opposed to a salesperson, has made a big difference for us.”
By dedicating senior customer success managers to nurture ongoing clients, Temenos ensures banks fully benefit from upgrades and new features. This shift has coincided with enhanced implementations and improved client satisfaction in many projects.
Temenos also overhauled its delivery model to improve consistency. It consolidated global services and introduced rigorous partner certification. According to Moroney: “We see all of our 750 delivery specialists at Temenos and 8,000 consultants in partner organisations as our colleagues. They have been trained on the latest platform, and Temenos now oversees over 300 customer go-lives per year with a more standardised approach – and there’s been a noticeable uptick in client satisfaction.”
Temenos works to prove its value to clients. Through a value benchmark programme, it gathers performance data from about 150 customer banks to provide each with concrete metrics and best practices. This helps quantify outcomes – for example, how adopting a new module might cut processing time or improve a cost-income ratio – so that clients see tangible results from the software.
