Temenos, a Switzerland-based software company specializing in enterprise banking solutions and financial services, announced the launch of its new Temenos Exchange to encourage and accelerate co-innovation among banks and fintech solution providers, according to a press release.
The company says the new Exchange will increase the speed at which banks and other financial institutions can integrate solutions, by offering point-and-click service deployment through pre-built integrations.
The launch follows a recent survey by the Economist Intelligence Unit and Temenos, that found nearly half (47%) of banking IT executives expect their businesses to “evolve into ecosystems over the next two years, offering their own and third-party products and services to customers as well as other financial organizations.”
Accelerating innovation
The Temenos Exchange is set to replace the company’s previous ‘Temenos Marketplace’, which it has operated since early 2016, and will now also act as an accelerator by providing fintech providers with access to over 3,000 of Temenos’ banking clients in 150 countries.
The new marketplace currently supports about 50 fintech companies; it is expected to add another 150 companies in the next few years. The company says it is significantly expanding its integrations team so that solutions on the platform are tested, secure and bank-ready.
In order to support the Exchange, Temenos is also launching a new developer program, SCALE, which will give participants access to an API portal and multi-product sandboxes.
The company also unveiled a list of new automations and low-code support for the program at its recent virtual developer conference, including standardized drag-and-drop integration patterns, microservices and automation testing.
These tools are designed to give developers a space to validate, improve and speed up product innovation. They will also provide business expertise support and proof of concept testing for early-stage fintechs that want to “bring new ideas to reality.”
Global scaling and the role of APIs
“Historically, we’ve gone to a customer and said whatever you want, we can build,” President, Americas of Temenos Jacqueline White said in an interview with FinLedger.
“But we realized that’s not really scalable for a company. So from our product perspective, we’ve pivoted and turned to what we call API-first. We said let’s expose the APIs in the core, in the Infinity Digital Front End, and then let customers come and plug into that,” she said.
The exchange will also utilize the Temenos Banking Cloud, which launched in May, to decrease the time financial institutions spend launching products and services. The cloud-native platform uses AI to drastically reduce operating costs compared to legacy systems. It also enables the company to localize products across different markets.
“We have a country model bank for Canada, one for the US, one for Mexico, one for Brazil, etc. This API-first framework allows us to land in any one of those countries, take that core product, and then regionalize it or localize it for specific regulations,” White said.
White says that Temenos is making large strides across the globe, especially within the US, due to the company’s growing number of partnerships, strategic acquisitions and cloud-based banking opportunities. Recent US acquisitions include Avoka in 2018 and Kony in 2019.
She believes that the company is poised to rapidly expand its footprint in North America, despite the fact foreign companies have traditionally struggled to infiltrate the US market.
“I feel like 2022 is going to be a really tremendous time of accelerated growth in the North America region. I really stand by this. By Q3 or Q4 of next year, I don’t think anybody will be able to say that Temenos is a European company that isn’t ready for the US. There will be too many customers, too many logos and too many success stories,” she said.
“Open for growth. That’s what it’s all about.”
In other recent fintech news, Thought Machine raised a $200 million Series C to bring legacy banking to the cloud. The Green Digital Finance Alliance (GDFA) and Swiss Green Fintech Network also announced a drafted taxonomy aimed at coordinating a market standard for assessing green fintechs.