Temenos brings Open Banking to core platform

At the 18th annual Temenos Community Forum in Lisbon, 27 April 2017, Temenos (SIX: TEMN) today announces the launch of open banking- and PSD2 -targeted services to facilitate the exchange of value between banks and fintech companies.

These cloud-based services extend Temenos’ award-winning MarketPlace initiative to allow Temenos customers to take advantage of the move to open banking.

The Open Banking Opportunity

The increasing use of Open APIs, together with regulatory initiatives such as PSD 2 in Europe, is leading to a new era of collaboration between banks and third-parties. Temenos aims to provide the technology platform to make this happen.

As Jacob Morgan, Senior Analyst at Forrester Research Inc., wrote in the February 2017 report, The Open Banking Revolution Is Imminent, “The power of open lies in ecosystems. Ecosystem-based business models will become mission critical as open banking and regulator-driven innovation builds collaboration into the value chain. Banks will deliver customer outcomes with partners, exploring new models based around marketplaces and open service provision.”

Building on the Temenos MarketPlace

Last year, recognising the opportunity for banks and fintech companies to work together, Temenos launched its MarketPlace, an online store of fintech solutions that have been pre-integrated with the Temenos Suites. Today, MarketPlace counts over 100 fintech solutions and accounts for over USD5m in revenues for the Providers.

With today’s announcement, the MarketPlace becomes an open banking platform:

• with the launch of “Sandbox”, a non-production PaaS environment, Temenos customers can now test MarketPlace solutions much more quickly and easily, accelerating innovation cycles;
• by introducing aggregation and payment initiation services, the platform gives the opportunity for banks to themselves to become AISPs and PISPs under the PSD 2 legislation;
• by augmenting its ecosystem of application software providers with integrated banking service providers, which gives the opportunity for Temenos customers not just to aggregate, but also offer third-party products and services to their customers;
• with the introduction of additional APIs, interfaces and data services, the MarketPlace will become a full plug and play platform for commerce and app development.

Asif Khan, Head of Solution Engineering at ABN AMRO International, commented, “ABN AMRO International is actively pursuing an Open Banking strategy to create better experiences and choice for our customers. After some progress in the local market, we are pursuing opportunities within the international business. A challenge for us is to onboard fintech partners fast enough and we look forward to capitalizing on the broader properties of the MarketPlace platform to solve this.”

Strengthened team, new partnerships

With now a broader remit, the MarketPlace management team has been strengthened. Aaron Phethean, Marketplace Director, is joined by Ben Robinson, Group Chief Strategy Officer, and Duena Blomstrom, who joins today as Head of Sales.

To foster the creation of an ever growing ecosystem, Temenos has been creating strategic relationships with incubators and accelerators around the globe. This started in 2015 by helping to establish Fintech Fusion, the first fintech accelerator in Switzerland. Today, Temenos announces that is has become a Leadership Circle Partner at the Luxembourg House of Financial Technology, Luxembourg’s dedicated fintech platform.