22-05-2025
Temenos Community Forum welcomes an era of innovation, customer centricity and agentic tools
Temenos CEO Jean-Pierre Brulard opened this year's Temenos Community Forum (TCF), in Madrid, Spain, with an impassioned speech focused on customer and partner gratitude.
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Contextualising the scope of the payments landscape and its desire to innovate, Brulard explained that the plenary hall contained 1000 people from 90 countries. Against the backdrop of 347 go-live projects, he went on to list some of the key points of celebration across different continents - mostly the Americas, Europe, the Middle East, and Asia. Importantly, whilst assisted and enabled by Temenos, Brulard made sure to congratulate the customer implementation.
Backing up their increased focus on customer centricity, Brulard described his 45,000 miles of travel on what he termed as his 'Listening & Learning Tour' where he directly gathered feedback from existing customers and partners. This feedback, he explained, was broken down into four key challenges:
Growth via differentiation and technology; Improvement of customer centricity across multi-channel methodologies; Operational efficiencies; and Risk and compliance.
In response, Brulard said: "These challenges were existing already last year. They are not new. This year, you are facing a new one: macroeconomic uncertainty. In times of uncertainty, you have two options: one is to wait and see and to postpone your investment, and the second one is really to focus your investment on what really matters, which is technology. As we have seen in the past, during different times of crisis and uncertainty, the banks that have invested in technology not only perform better, but widen the gap with the others."
Following this and reiterating Temenos solutions being co-designed by the customer through implemented feedback, Brulard unveiled the provider's mission statement, tagline and an accompanying video. The tagline summarises all of these elements neatly: Leading Banking Forward.
Concluding his session, Brulard said: "It is not only our journey, it is our collective purpose as a community to lead banking forward. You are not in this room by coincidence, you are here because you have shown leadership."
Leveraging AI: building less, building better
Barb Morgan, chief product and technology officer, unveiled several generative AI and agentic AI developments. Morgan started, in some sense, where Brulard finished: re-establishing the importance of banking on society and with the contributions of customers:
"We didn't create this mission in a boardroom: we shaped it with you, with our customers, our partners, and our people. It's grounded in the fact that banking isn't standing still and neither are we. To me, leading banking forward is more than a mission, it's a commitment, it's a call to action because what we do has foundational impacts on economies, on businesses and on peoples' lives. [...] Now my job is to make it real."
Morgan later described a story of a mother whose house had been lost during a tornado in the US and had been helped by a local banker. While it was an emotive story, it also emphasised the impact banks have.
Before unveiling Temenos' GenAI Copilot tool, a full customer rollout of an internally developed tool, Morgan explained that the intention is to build less but build better, reiterating the motto of "listening to lead." This was later demonstrated by a theatrical performance of a typical use case. A fictional customer spoke to the audience through the copilot tool, which was embedded into Microsoft Teams and assisted them with applying overdraft limits and interest rates on an account.
Morgan also announced two other developments: the Temenos AI Studio and FCM AI Agent. Discussing their AI Studio, she said: "In the past, we would have conversations with our customers and they'd tell us what they need us to build and we'd say okay. Now we're going to have those conversations, we're gonna bring our expertise and impact, but if you need anything specific to you, we're also going to provide our AI Studio so that you have the ability to develop, customise, deploy and monitor your own models. We'll preload it with banking modules that you can start from, we'll provide training and support that then allow you to build those for yourselves.'
Lastly, when announcing the FCM AI Agent, she described it as a training solution that focuses on compliance, risk, and financial crime. This agent, Morgan explained, is not just an AI solution that provides clarity, intelligence and security insight but that it is also "the first solution of its kind to receive regulatory acceptance for explainable reason and sanctioned screening."
Increasing innovation and systemising service
During an announcement-packed first day of the conference, there was also a discussion from Temenos CRO, Will Moroney, who explained how their service delivery is systemised and collaborated on in such a manner that their team is not just the 750 colleagues, but also the 8000 people within their partnerships. This message was backed up by a belief that if, when visiting product management offices, Moroney could not "determine who the Temenos person is, that is the definition of success."
During the rest of the day, there were more discussions around innovation and the purposeful usage of generative AI and agentic AI. These took the form of a case study conversation with Paul Weiss, CTO, Regions Bank; Marnix Tummers, IT director, wealth management, ABN AMRO; and a keynote from Christian Saredis, chief executive, EMEA Financial Services, Microsoft.
The first day of TCF can be summarised in tone, quite succinctly, by an Oren Harari quote referenced by Saredis: "The electric light didn't come from the continuous improvement of the candle."
