Keeping up with the times, or being ahead of it, is a necessity for financial institutions, banks in particular. This need to be ahead makes them act swiftly to changes, adopting best-case solutions to provide features to customers. These extensions over the years turn complex and expensive, ultimately hampering growth.

More and more banks are paying attention to these complexity costs that their legacy systems incur, and Temenos Transact offers them a great way to move forward. The tools available in Temenos Transact manage front and back end of banking operations, and their flexibility enables shorter to-the-market timelines, efficiently.

The Temenos upgrade options

When banks are aiming for an upgrade with Temenos, there are two mandatory activities that needs to be done: one is the runtime upgrade and other is the core application upgrade. There could also be other activities or migrations involved as the figure above highlights, but they may or may not be implemented based on the limitations and necessities.

A runtime upgrade is concerned with the Transact application framework be it C-based TAFC or java based TAFJ. While the C-based systems will be upgraded to TAFJ, the banks that are already on TAFJ will be upgraded to the latest framework. A database migration would be mandatory during the move from TAFC to TAFJ, while systems already on TAFJ can upgrade to a newer version of RDBMS as an optional activity. During this process, upgrading from a legacy operating system framework like HP UX, Solaris, or IBM AX to a modern Linux-based system.

This can also be used as an opportunity to move to a browser-based application server instead on a desktop-based one. Moving across browser-based options is possible too, say from Websphere or Weblogic to JBoss. Also, if the banks decide to only go with the technical upgrade to take advantage of features that are available in newer versions, moving customer decisions to the core feature will provide better results.

Challenges and the nitty-gritties

Upgrading Temenos has its own challenges, but these can differ from bank to bank. Broadly, these can be classified into two sections: Generic challenges and application specific challenges.

Among generic challenges, ensuring very little downtime is important for customer satisfaction. Conducting effort and cost versus benefit analysis before discoverization, and then an internal pre-analysis session to understand the impact on local developments help in this regard. The bank’s Temenos team should be involved from the beginning of the upgrade process too, and changes in infra hardware training or resource requirements should also be considered. Once these factors are known or in place, the implementation timeline can be created. These implementation timelines must also factor in the time required to be compliant with regulations and other necessities.

Factoring in hardware compatibility and infrastructure related changes allows for an accurate timeline, and the tech stack included in every Temenos release provides details about the current hardware being used. This information can be used to decide if hardware related upgrades are essential. If there is a substantial difference between the source and target release, banks can assess the technical capabilities of their internal teams based on changes in requirements and train relevant resources.

Changes on the technical front start with the backend core. While moving to a latest release, it is worth spending some time to understand if some of the local development done on the current release can be moved to core. this will save retrofitting related work, and help with better product architecture, streamlined processes and better functional capabilities. Moving a module to core helps in future upgrade as well.

Starting the upgrade process

Target release selection and prep-work before upgrade, puts details out in the open and helps in clearly defining goals and results that are expected from the upgrade. Based on these, the release to be upgraded can be selected. The options here are either the most recent release, or a stable but slightly older release. The points that need to be considered during both activities are listed below.

After discussing these points internally, the organization should shortlist a few target releases. Upgrade is not only a technological change; it brings in a lot of functional changes in the newer release, so the internal discussion between banks, the IT team and the business team is important. This helps in understanding the pain areas of the business teams and the capabilities of the target release.

Stages of upgrade

There are different stages of upgrade, depending on the current state of the organization. Depending on the exact context, some of these stages might not be relevant for the organization too. This chart below lists all the different stages that can be a part of the upgrade process, and organizations are required to pick steps that make the most sense to them.

To simplify the stage selection process, here’s an example: An organization up for a pure technical upgrade should not consider the stage 4 of this process, which is related to functional upgrade in a typical technical upgrade scenario. An update will start with discovery and scoping, which requires the bank’s involvement, starts with hardware assessment. Also, some of these stages can and will run in parallel or one stage can end after the next stage.

Run-time upgrades depend on the current environment, and will be either a lower to higher release upgrade in terms of TAFC or TAFJ – or a migration if the move is from TAFC to TAFJ, which comes with its own additional steps. Technical upgrade stage is where core layout changes are done, and any new product to be implemented will be done in a parallel way. Code conversion of the target release changes in routine to make use and new improved functionalities, and can help to compare between the local developments and their source codes.

Mock upgrade strategy

Planning mocks and executing them in a timely manner is one of the most critical factors for success for an upgrade project. Here, the base pack practice approach is divided into different mock cycles:

The example of Mock cycle 4 shows how there can be multiple marks and/or cycles inside a cycle. Initial mock cycles don’t consider the local components yet but only checks how the core runs in the newer release. After that, core and local codes and multi-threaded local jobs can be conducted. These mock cycles will help in running upgrades smoothly and seamlessly.

Back to core

There are two scenarios possible with back to core – either by configuration, or with local development in addition to it. The local development part is important if the organization is currently using a process that might not be totally fitting with all the core capabilities, and can get a better architecture and lesser maintenance.

Some of the main activities during Back to core exercise are :

• Existing functionality mapping to new system/modules
• Impact assessment.
• Existing customization will be mapped to new core functionalities.
• Further gaps will be customized
• POC
• Product configuration document.
• FSD and TSD for any additional customization.
• Descoping of local Transact tables and data migration to core tables.
• Preparation of User guides and training documentation.

In the discovery and scoping phase, analysing the local development enables the IT team to identify the customizations done and the business flow that is being followed – and then compare it against the capabilities of the core modules.

During assessment. Quite a few factors need to be analysed –be it the extent of benefit resulting from the effort put in, changes that are future proof, scalability, impact on surrounding systems, usage, licencing costs and more. If an existing customization is known to store data in a local custom table, it has to be moved to the core. The process needs to have a proper user guide and training documentation, as employees and customers who are used to existing customized processes need to understand the same. The documentation can start during the analysis phase even, and must be continually updated until the module goes into UAT.

Migrating from Legacy T24 modules to latest Transact modules

This is relevant for a functional upgrade. However, similar situation may arrive even for a technical upgrade, e.g. moving away from Temenos webservice to IRIS.

Module migration during a functional upgrade evolves around two parts, first implement the new module and then migrate the data from legacy T24 module to the new module.

Below is an example showing the approach that we follow for LD to AA migration.

Conclusion

The latest upgrade from Temenos has several changes, on both business and framework fronts. Several new modules, including Temenos Insight for deep analysis and high quality reports and Temenos Payment to support seamless, high performance payment solutions, provide banks the kind of flexibility, safety and control they need. The new version of cloud-native and cloud-agnostic Temenos User Experience Platform (UXP) supports both mobile and Internet banking. These features are designed to improve performance and customer responsiveness while controlling costs. With Temenos, banks can smoothly digitize their core banking processes and regulations while staying agile. Get a perspective on Temenos Transact upgrade from this webinar recording. With the help of an experienced Temenos partner like Maveric, banks can accelerate their upgrade approach in a cost effective, non-disruptive and secure way.

Operating in the dynamic world, with the ever-growing digital first approach towards everything, the financial services industry, especially the banks, are looking to up their game to stay on track and in trend. The banks are coming to the daunting realization that their legacy systems will soon become obsolete and they will need to roll up their sleeves to bring in rapid modernization.

EY’s Global FinTech Adoption Index 2019 suggests that the adoption of fintech has almost doubled in the past two years, reaching to 64% in 2019 from 33% in 2017 with emerging markets leading the way. In fact, the index also finds that the rate of adoption is growing faster than anticipated depicting that the future of banking is digital

The rapidly evolving digital trend is seeing an equal rise of complexities in core banking solutions. Your connected core needs a unique support and maintenance framework to consistently deliver the best performance. Contextual support solutions that offer banking customers with faster resolution in case of a production issue, process streamlining opportunities, continuous monitoring, automation first approaches, cost optimization etc, will help them to gain a substantial competitive edge.

Maveric’s Temenos Transact Integrated Support Model

Maveric is a trusted Temenos partner of choice for more than 15 years and our 20+ years of expertise in the banking industry gives us an accumulated insight to provide customer-focused Temenos Transact core banking support services.

Our experts undertake a modular approach to stabilize and optimize core banking applications while freeing up the crucial time of the company’s team to focus on their core business tasks. Our key priority is business innovation to maintain system availability and improve operational efficiencies to lower costs of operations in the long term.

Our certified Temenos specialists enable us to deliver high-quality support that is optimally tailored to address the existing and futuristic business requirements of the bank. We offer consultation, follow up, and coordination for end-to-end tech, environment, and operational support services:

• Tech support – Under tech solutions, our team offers support for priority Level 1, 2, and 3 for effective incident management, resolution of technical errors and issues, and code development as per the bank’s specific requirements. Our systematic and disciplined approach reduces the number of incidents and enables us to achieve a short resolution time.
• Environment support– We offer tailored Temenos product development and subsequent environment support. Under this, we extend support not only for production but also for the non-production environments. Our certified and highly-qualified team along with our automation-first approach makes it easier to allow robust development, product testing, training, and pre-production of the solutions.
• Operational Services – Under our services for operational support, our team uses a real-time dashboard to fix defective codes, make any L3 code changes, and release updates for release deployment. Apart from this, we undertake configuration, user management, and continuous monitoring of batch processes along with COB management.

Temenos offers exceptional tools and software systems to address fraud, manage the risk, and stay compliant with the standards of the products.

Our Managed Transition Process

Our team initiates the Temenos transition process while keeping in mind the risk management to minimize business disruption and maximize knowledge acquisition. We value your time and understand the criticality of smooth migration and therefore, we opt for a more streamlined and stage-based approach to achieve a steady growth-oriented state in just about 12 weeks. Here is how we do it:

• Proper planning for transition: Planning the transition is the first and foremost stage and may require a couple of weeks for our R&D team and Temenos experts to properly draft out an implementation plan.
• Knowledge transfer: An extension of the planning phase, under this stage, we brainstorm, ideate, configure, and share necessary knowledge for Temenos transition.
• Primary Support: Code development, environment management, release deployment, etc., are undertaken at this stage which may take up to 4 weeks.
• Secondary Support and Achieving a Steady State: A phase of continuous improvement to achieve a smoother operations state within the next four weeks, our team offers training, testing, and monitoring along with the close of business management.

The Maveric 3C Advantage

Maveric has core Temenos expertise including the Transact application allowing us to offer flexible engagement models. Partnering with us for all your Temenos solution support will help you leverage the best value out of your core banking systems and environment.

Outsource Temenos support services to Maveric and enjoy the 3C advantage of best-in-class competencies, superior capabilities, and passion for continuous improvement. Let us discuss each one in detail:

Competency: We have been serving top banks across the world by developing cutting-edge competencies to build tailored Temenos products that deliver optimized results. This involves:

• Superior dedication and cultured ownership on steering the transformation programs for effective and steady growth.
• A pragmatic approach to innovation with automation at its core.
• Building strong relationship ethos and trust in the zero-hype policy.

Capability: Maveric proudly boasts a vast cumulative team experience in Temenos Transact implementation and draws the best consultants and experts available from a global resource pool of Temenos Transact professionals.

Our Temenos certified specialists are seasoned with various modules offering them a more knowledge-driven insight into various aspects of Temenos.

Their years of experience have led them to work across different OS and databases, adding further to their expertise.

• Process monitoring expertise through Run book
• Diverse exposure in commonly used middleware’s
• Experience in smooth execution of COBs and other batch jobs
• Vast knowledge repositories

Continuous Improvement: Our centers of excellence continuously strive to improve deliverables and innovate better solutions. We are always discovering new ways of using technologies, developing better products, and offer better turnarounds to maximize the operational efficiency and Temenos architecture of the bank.

• Developing automated help text and videos to address queries for commonly occurring issues
• Ensuring real-time notifications and alerts to stay agile
• Library of workaround solutions
• Improve IT maintenance schedules

Getting the best out of Maveric’s Temenos Support Services

As one of the world’s foremost providers of banking transformation services, Maveric has played an instrumental role in transforming banks and other financial institutions through cutting-edge technologies. We offer comprehensive, end-to-end Temenos application support to ensure business continuity by resolving any business-related or technical errors, complying with SLAs, and offering innovative automation services. Present in multiple countries, Maveric has a 550-member team with in-depth Temenos product proficiency. Outsourcing Temenos support to us allows organizations to maximize their revenues and significantly reduce their direct and indirect operational expenses. Thus, ensuring your internal teams to focus more on critical business priorities to #AccelerateNext.

Will traditional banks switch to mobile-only banking?

In light of the Covid-19, we have seen global economies getting hamstrung with budgets being pushed back significantly. The banking sector is under a tremendous amount of strain to keep their businesses running smoothly. A significant amount of volatility has been created in capital markets around the world. Traditional banking systems were primarily engaged by the baby boomers. However, it has been lacking lately due to trepidation in engaging with in-person / physical banking processes.

So where do traditional banks go from here in this new normal?

Let us first understand, what risks do traditional banks face if they stay dated? The last 8 – 10 years saw the introduction of Fintech startups and solutions as new entrants following the economic crisis of 2008. This was further amplified with the massive penetration of affordable internet-enabled smartphones into the market which completely changed consumer behavior. Online banking, mobile apps, and wallets became widely accepted by businesses and people (especially millennials) as a primary means of transaction.

What should traditional banks change?

Adopt a new strategy and leverage digital channels

Traditional banks with their brick-and-mortar approach are still vied by the older generation. This can be attributed to the fact that not all people are inherently tech-savvy. However, consumer preference tells us a different story. Mobile banking reigns as the primary means of transaction with the larger populace being on the Gen X, Millennials and Gen Z. Mobile banking is also more convenient, secure, works 24×7, and eliminates the need to visit a branch for transactions and enquiries. In fact, this is a critical factor that helped Fintech companies thrive onto the new generation cohort. They clearly prefer engaging with a digital platform on a handheld device over traditional banking, as they have started their lives with mobile devices – including their first toddler game. This does not spell doom for traditional banks. Many banks have revamped some legacy systems and adopted digital means on mobile. These banks have been trying to address consumer demands by:

• Personalizing transactions and engagement
• Personalizing products (banks are doing away with a one-size-fits-all approach)
• Promoting an online banking culture as opposed to in-person engagement

Even if mobile banking becomes the norm everywhere, banks must be ready with the required technology as well as be prepared to address the following points.

• User Experience: The success of any banking mobile app depends heavily on a sound user experience. Pre-cursors for a great user experience include – an impactful design thinking, a good and easy-to-navigate user interface, an aesthetic layout with visual elements that nurtures an emotional connect with consumers, and great responsiveness on part of the application itself.
• Frictionless Customer Journey: Today’s tech savvy consumer base yearns for convenience, speed, and automation. Higher wait time, pop-ups, excessive forms, and latency in query resolution can impact engagement and deter consumers. Banks need to address these pain points at every stage of the customer journey to retain customers as well as attract new customers.
• AI-driven Customer Experience: Improved personalization, the introduction of chatbots and virtual assistants have made customer query resolution and escalations a lot more seamless. Round-the-clock support coupled with promoting relevant products fuels a sense of desire for customers to opt in.
• Realtime engagement and marketing: Bank’s systems should practice usage of contextually-relevant messaging to forge connections with consumers, react to their immediate intentions rather than attempting to predict them and give them a best possible offer to make a sale.
• Analytics for a Superior Experience and Continuous Improvement: Measuring the app’s performance is important to learn how customers engage with it. This will encourage banks to market more effectively to their target audience.

According to a report released by Business Insider, mobile banking is estimated to grow at a CAGR of 2.83% between 2019 to 2024. Digital banks in some capacity are preferred by consumers as far as the enormous multitude of services on offer goes. Security with online banking is debatable but mobile banking is touted to be very secure with two-step verification and other options fail to prevent unauthorized access. Personalization is a huge advantage with digital banking services. While cold calling and random sales-related calls are often unwelcoming with consumers, personalized engagement boosts potential conversions as well as improves a consumer’s relationship with the bank.

In this competitive market, most banks have developed a mobile app/s to help customers perform banking transactions with a single click. The current Covid-19 situation has intensified the need to adopt digital banking services, applications, and cloud infrastructure. Today, adopting these tenets is pivotal for finance businesses to scale up their demand while providing personalized digital experiences to their customers at the same time.

Temenos infinity comes to the rescue!

Temenos Infinity drives awe inspiring customer experience journeys right from the stages of customer acquisition, servicing, and retention. The new age omni channel platform offers breathtaking propositions as mentioned below

• With open APIs and extensible architecture, Temenos delivers customer experience solutions that lets banks expand products as per their vision. You will not be locked into a closed-end solution or tied to a single back-office silo again.
• Temenos Infinity analytics use customer behavior to improve customer outcomes, drive upsell, and improve profitability.
• Temenos Infinity gives your bank the agility to create dynamic products, support instant decisions, and increase speed to market.
• Temenos Infinity helps you personalize the banking experience to match your customer’s financial future and at the same time engage your customers and drive more cross selling.

As a certified Temenos partner, Maveric systems re-energizes your connected core by extracting maximum value through full lifecycle implementation of Temenos Infinity. Our close alignment with Temenos as a certified partner, help banking customers to get rapid and easy access of Temenos Infinity’s application features. With our certified Temenos specialists, we orchestrate and articulate unmatched Temenos product stack mastery to lay the success path for your future.

With a dwindling aging population and young consumers on the rise, the traditional banks may not do away totally with their branches but there will be a significant reduction of branches and mobile-only banking will gain tremendous impetus for a foreseeable future with many banks looking to adopt a mobile-only future. The past few years have seen the gap in capability between a digital platform and a mobile platform reduce drastically. Mobile apps are now on par to provide the same or better services than a digital platform may have previously – the two are almost synonymous. Most consumers would welcome mobile banking. However, for the small minority of technophobic people, call centers and bank branches may remain relevant.

With the launch of Temenos Infinity, there is a lot of curiosity on what this product will offer and how will it change the way people bank. This blog aims to summarize key characteristics of the product.

The endless possibilities of Temenos Infinity

Being the first core-agnostic product, Temenos Infinity elevates customer experience journeys to newer heights through its power-packed XAI-driven engine. The robust microservices based architecture plays its trump card for enabling customer personification through its standalone distribution services, beyond banks existing digital banking capabilities. The following infographic highlights some of the key capabilities of Infinity platform.

Top 9 things to know about Temenos Infinity

Let’s start with the product architecture.

Temenos Infinity product architecture is agile, it allows distinct and faster upgrades, and improves scalability. Through this upgradeable, standalone distribution services banks are able to retain their own apps and digital banking experience but offer deeper personalized customer engagement capabilities. The product is SaaS cloud-native, cloud-agnostic and is easily deployable on any platform. The modular design of Infinity, where banking capability is deployable as separate, productised modules, allows Temenos to deliver capability on any scale within the bank’s ecosystem. The deployment of Infinity can be different for every bank based on their business requirements and can create seamless banking experience across channels. Infinity’s marketing and user modules can reinvent bank’s digital channels through its new mobile application.

API First Approach
Temenos Infinity product uses APIs which are Experience APIs, Enterprise APIs and Third party APIs. This helps Infinity fit anywhere and allows the bank to swap in, swap out or develop resources as its digital strategy evolves. Temenos Open APIs (a readymade repository of over 700 customizable banking APIs for Transact, DataHub, Fund Administration, Portfolio Management & Open Banking) are backed by a developer portal, that streamlines the banks’ ecosystem to connect with partners to provide the best seamless experience.

Design Engineering
Infinity is instinctive in design. Banks can use Infinity’s solution features to provide services and cross-selling products / services based on customer profile. Infinity’s design tools allow banks to quickly adjust or create workflows, products, and services. With its XAI powered engines and behavioural analytics capability, it advocates the bank to extend new services and offerings for their potential customers.

Temenos Quantum Visualizer a powerful, multi-channel JS API framework that enables designers, developers and line-of-business to quickly configure, integrate the Fabric services, build and deploy the apps across the channels.

Real-Time Marketing 
Infinity’s real-time marketing capability helps to demonstrate the importance of the product to personalized customer journeys. Real-time events initiated by customers, bank or external parties are subject to Infinity’s Digital Decision Engine. Every data source, from account activity and location to social media and biometrics, is analyzed to deliver the right product to the right person in real time through the right channel.

Intelligent decisioning, a highly customizable workflow and smooth third-party integration are all designed to drive both customer satisfaction and build long lasting relationships with those customers. A deeper explanation for Infinity’s agility and flexibility lies in the decision to bring the marketing catalogue, product details and banking processes out of Transact (the core banking product) and into a completely stand-alone front office.

Single Experience Platform
A banking organization needs a seamless flow of information across all the departments or segments. Temenos Infinity offers an intuitive interface that enables the bank to enrich the customer experience all through the customer journey across all channels by configuring and integrating the experience APIs. The product offers one-bank experience to customers.

In-depth Analytics for Superior Results
It is a no brainer that deep data analytics is helping banking organizations reap huge benefits. Temenos Infinity uses an analytics engine that not only helps the banks improve their profitability, but it also helps to improve the market penetration by analysing the customer behaviour and banking patterns. Analytics integrated with Temenos Infinity allows banks insights into clickstream and digital campaign effectiveness.

Microservices Architecture
Temenos Infinity employs a microservices architecture in order to deliver it’s cloud-native, cloud-agnostic capability. These microservices are highly maintainable, scalable and independently deployable/upgradeable. These microservices are translated as cloud-based API’s for enabling banks to easily connect with their ecosystem partners, developers and Fintech community.

Faster Time to Market
Temenos Infinity’s boxed solution structure offers the convenience of controlling your roadmap, thus helping customers to accelerate their time to market. Banks can launch  new products and digital initiatives within just weeks. Continuous improvements can be introduced based on the regular campaign performance monitoring and the desired outcomes. Temenos Infinity is the leader in customer experience agility.

Deployment Flexibilities
Temenos Infinity is primarily a SaaS based solution and can be easily deployed in an on-premises environment. Infinity can be implemented on different cloud platforms including AWS and Azure to name a few. Additionally, it can also be implemented either in Temenos SaaS or Customer’s own cloud.

How can Maveric Systems help you in your Temenos Infinity Journey

At Maveric Systems, we bring our connected core promise alive to #AccelerateNext using our strong team of 550+ Temenos specialists who offer encyclopaedic Temenos proficiency. We analyse, implement, upgrade and support Temenos suite of applications, with our contextual solutions and services. With our best practices, proven methods, tools and accelerators, we unlock maximum returns from your Temenos investments.

We support our partners and customers in building the Infinity user journeys, deploy out of the box features, customizations and custom apps development. We also help customers in setting up Infinity Cloud and On-premise environments. Maveric has in-house capabilities to train the client resources on latest Infinity versions such as 2020.10 & 2021.01 etc. Unveil the promises of Temenos Infinity and some of its best features to #AccelerateNext your banking transformation.