Temenos Community Forum opens the floor to AI governance

Finextra

23-05-2025

Setting the tone for the second day of Temenos Community Forum, Dr Jonnie Penn, associate teaching professor of AI ethics and society, University of Cambridge delivered a speech on both the growth of AI and the task of governing its ethical standards.
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Beginning with a historical overview of AI's inception and perception, Penn briefly explained the impact of Oxford professor Nick Bostrom's book Superintelligence and the level of fear that followed it. Penn, in a bid to give more context behind what AI seeks to do from an optimistic standpoint, showed the trajectory it took from the humble origins of computerised gaming tests to the gradual development of intelligent models and robotics.
At this point, Penn broke down the ways in which AI can currently be defined by its maturity and strength, and how these can be harnessed by a structured level of regulation and governance. For example, AI excels at lower-risk tasks such as recognising a song from audio or medically diagnosing a picture of a mole, but is currently flawed when it comes to social judgement.
Penn shared a diagram that defined how, at this stage of AI, we can future proof according to levels of risk. From low risk to high risk and correspondingly, charting the fraught points of action between AI perception and AI judgement.
Continuing to describe the varying approaches and emotions surrounding AI, he made parallels to news articles from 15 years ago, citing fear over social media, and listed the way that advertising will move dramatically alongside AI development.
Crucially, Penn remained positive about our choices against the darker sides of AI: "If you think about social media, that set of affordances was used for good and for bad, and we are still human on the other side, right? And AI will be the same. One way you can think about how you participate in this moment [...] is to think of AI as a sociotechnical craft and not purely a technical craft. What's the difference? Well, you might think about where AI happens, and it would be natural to assume it's in the IT department, it's in the computer science department. It's them over there. [...] It's also the legal department, it's also in HR and not just in it's use but in the professional skills across an organisation - all of them are relevant."
The future of banking
Isabelle Guise, chief marketing officer, Temenos also took to the stage to define the key banking trends of 2025 based on a recent survey of 400+ global banking leaders. This research further highlighted the need for more worldwide guidance and support around governance and AI deployment ethics, showing a continued concern around how to balance innovation and risk and to remain reliable and trustworthy. While this remains the case, it also showed that banks are working harder to improve customer experience abilities and drive innovations around securities as a result of remaining concerns.
Interestingly, while the research displayed an investment in technology, it highlighted a divide within AI readiness and AI governance. In fact, split almost equally, 46% had not adopted AI and 43% were at some stage within the process. While 42% of those currently deploying AI admitted not having a dedicated governance team, 90% still said that they want AI to merely augment human processes not replace them.
According to Guise, this suggests a lack of understanding, rather than a lack of willingness to govern: "This confirms that GenAI is still at an early stage with no clear implementation process based on industry standards and that's why we see the opportunity for this community to share best practices about it, so that we can be ahead of the curve."
Continuing in this vein to involve the community gathered at this year's forum, she used the research as a starting point which the community can grow stronger from and echoed Dr Jonnie Penn's sentiments that the industry is moving in a positive direction.
Autonomous banking and TCF 2026
Guise was then followed by two sessions focussed on the benefits and updates within autonomous banking and balancing the human-in-the-loop element before the two days were concluded, once again, by Temenos CEO, Jean-Pierre Brulard. Recapping on the successes of the forum, Brulard thanked those in attendance before revealing the location and date of TCF 2026: May 5th - 7th in Copenhagen, Denmark.