When a bank customer deposits money, the transaction is entered in the ledger; when they take out a loan, the interest and instalment calculations follow; money moves from one branch to another. Hundreds of thousands of transactions are carried out through mobile apps, internet banking, ATMs and payment networks. Behind this modern banking sits complex software and technical infrastructure. Temenos, a Swiss multinational, builds and operates this infrastructure for many banks worldwide.
Founded in 1993, Temenos has so far delivered its technology to financial institutions in more than 150 countries. More than 950 banks use its core banking software, and it has more than 600 clients for digital banking technology. It also supplies digital banking, payments, wealth management, financial crime detection, lending management and AI-based technology, so its business now stretches from keeping a bank’s books to customer service and international transactions.
Temenos AG, based in Grand-Lancy in Switzerland, is an international software company listed on the stock exchange. George Koukis founded it in 1993. It began as a specialist in banking technology, but over time its business has broadened to cover almost the entire technological range of the financial sector. The company was listed on Switzerland’s SIX Swiss Exchange on 26 June 2001.
According to its 2025 annual report, the company had 5,205 people at year-end. That figure includes business partners and contractors as well as employees. Its workforce comes from 81 countries, and it has 51 offices in 36 countries.
Core banking software is the mainstay of the business, managing a bank’s deposits, loans, interest, accounts, customer data, transactions and financial products. Under conventional arrangements, separate technology across branches and departments can complicate data reconciliation and service delivery. A core banking system brings these operations under a single central technical framework, so when a customer deposits money at one branch, another branch or a digital channel has an up-to-date record of the account. The same system can run loan disbursement, instalment collection, interest calculation, deposit management, and transaction accounting.
Temenos Core is the company’s best-known core banking product, with different versions and capabilities suited to retail banking, business banking, corporate and commercial banking, treasury, and Islamic banking. A bank can choose to modernise a particular product or division rather than replace its entire technology in one go, then extend the change to other divisions in stages. Temenos calls this progressive modernisation.
Digital banking technology supports mobile apps, internet banking, opening digital accounts, verifying customer identity, transfers, bill payments, and online lending. Through the Temenos Digital platform, banks can build separate digital services for individual customers and for businesses. Its Journey Manager technology helps automate the steps in processes such as opening an account, verifying identity and applying for a loan.
Temenos Payments handles international and domestic transactions: transfers between banks, instant payments, cross-border transactions, processing payment instructions, and connections to various payment networks. Temenos Wallet Management, meanwhile, covers investment portfolios, asset valuation, investment reporting and the management of customers’ wealth.
Detecting money laundering and suspicious transactions is also an important part of the company’s business. Its Financial Crime Mitigation (FCM) technology helps verify customer identity, supports anti-money-laundering work, screens against lists of sanctioned individuals and organisations, monitors suspicious transactions and helps detect fraud. Its Lifecycle Management Suite covers the stages of taking a loan application, assessing risk, granting approval, collecting instalments and recovering defaulted loans. The company also has specialised technology for Islamic banks to run sharia-compliant financial products and services.
Cloud computing is another important element of Temenos’s technical capability. In addition to running software on their own servers, banks can choose a private cloud, public cloud, hybrid cloud or SaaS model. This reduces their dependence on their own technical infrastructure and allows capacity to be increased or reduced as needed. Under the SaaS model, the provider handles much of the running, updating, and maintenance of the software, leaving banks to focus on customer service and business growth rather than managing their own technology.
Temenos is also creating scope for AI to analyse customer data, assess risk, detect suspicious transactions, and support customer service and software development. Its Temenos Copilot for Core is built to provide AI-based support for a bank’s core banking operations, while the FCM AI Agent assists with work such as preventing financial crime and screening against sanctions.
Sacombank in Vietnam offers a recent example of the company’s capability in this technological shift. In 2026, the bank upgraded to Temenos’s latest core banking platform and moved from its own server-based system to a hybrid cloud infrastructure. According to a report in Vietnam Investment Review, application performance rose by 200 percent after the change, the time taken to deploy technology fell to a third of what it had been and the server capacity required dropped by 50 percent. The new platform can handle about 13 million transactions a day. The bank has also taken the initiative to use Temenos’s payments hub to strengthen its cross-border capability.
Temenos is also investing heavily in research and technology development. In last year’s annual report, the company said it invests about 20 percent of revenue in research and development each year. Its strategic aim is to strengthen its market position in core banking while expanding into related technical services such as cloud, AI, payments and digital banking.
Temenos currently does business in four regions: the Americas, Europe, the Middle East and Africa, and Asia-Pacific. According to the 2025 annual report, 28 percent of total revenue came from Europe, 26 percent from the Middle East and Africa, 25 percent from the Americas, and 21 percent from Asia-Pacific.
The effort to bring that entire technological range, from core banking to cloud and from payments to AI, under one roof is what has made Temenos an important presence in the global banking technology market. It is also expanding its business in Bangladesh’s banking sector.