Highlights from Temenos Community Forum (TCF) 2026

May 2026

Temenos Community Forum (TCF) 2026 in Copenhagen was my 20th plus TCF. For me, TCF provided the opportunity to engage with customers, partners, and the Temenos leadership alike. Like many other banking platform vendors today, Temenos put a strong focus on AI. But there was more to it than that. Let me briefly summarize a few highlights of TCF as I perceived them.

Its Strong Focus on Embedded AI Can Give Temenos A Competitive Edge    

Temenos’ strategy is based on what the company refers to as “Intelligent Core” and “Intelligent Digital” (essentially the backend and the frontend). It provides the foundation for embedding AI into the entire platform. To this end, Temenos uses four architectural buildings blocks: a so-called “Agentic Framework”, conversational interfaces, a so-called “Banking Knowledge Graph”, and the “Model Context Protocol” (MCP). 

Based on these elements, Temenos’ recently unveiled “Conversational Studio for Digital” can enable banks to develop digital (frontend) applications via conversational interfaces. On stage, Temenos demonstrated the bank product lifecycle through a role-playing exercise—from early requirements definition and product design, through the (AI-supported) creation of a digital solution, to the use of the new product by customers. The demo lasted about 30 minutes. In practice, this will likely take a few days.

Years ago, Temenos was one of the first vendors (if not the first) to provide banks with tools that could reduce product development time from a year to one or two months. Now, Temenos seems to have a done it again – from months to days. However, this sounds almost too good to be true. I will wait to make my final assessment until I’ve spoken to at least one Temenos customer who has used these new features in a production environment. Since only banks using the most recent Temenos release (R26) can currently use the new capabilities, this could take some time.

However, if one takes the role-playing exercise at face value (it seemed quite convincing), Temenos’ AI capabilities could give the company an edge over other vendors with a strong focus on AI, such as Infosys Finacle, SAP Fioneer, and SBS-Software. 

Where There Is Light, There Is Shadow    

During TCF, there wasn't a particularly strong focus on new business functionality. Of course, there is Temenos Financial Crime Mitigation (FCM) and a number of further functional highlights. In the past, however, emphasis was much more clearly on business functionality. This could certainly be seen as evidence for a hypothesis I put forward a few years ago: Architecture, not business functionality, will eventually become the decisive differentiator. However, I don’t believe we have fully reached this point yet.

Temenos also talked about core, SaaS, composability and enhancements. This makes certainly sense. However, some topics felt a bit like old wine in new bottles. For example, Temenos                 

• Positioned responsible AI as an accelerator for adoption – which may well be true. However, responsible AI (or XAI – explainable AI as Temenos used to call it) has been part of the Temenos strategy for many years.
  
  
• Focused heavily on composition and composable banking. From what I’ve seen so far (there may be more) Temenos merely refers to a division of the core into deposits and lending (componentization), along with a thin ledger. While this can simplify implementations, it is no longer a decisive unique selling point: Temenos could have gone further. By combining approaches like its “API first and interoperable”, more components, and its AI frameworks Temenos could lay the foundation for hyper-composability and dominate the market for the time being. However, that would likely be asking too much.
  
  
• Seems to breathing new life into existing product ideas. Based on the general information I have about the “thin ledger” (including its development as part of a partnership with a major bank) this sound like a revamped version of “Temenos Positions”, which was announced in 2024. However, given the lack of details about the thin ledger, I could be wrong.
  
  
• Could be causing confusion among its customers. Temenos offers a feature called “Copilot” for a number of its banking software products. The vendor is quick to point out that Temenos Copilot is not based on Microsoft Copilot and is also available in the AWS cloud. However, my conversations with banks indicate that the product names are causing confusion and — to some extent — scepticism.

I think Temenos needs to refine its “composability approach” in particular. Earlier this year, a Capco representative mentioned in a Temenos webinar that composability is now more “…a strategic necessity rather than a technology upgrade” (this is probably not a completely fair quote, as it is often with quotes used out of context). However, I am firmly convinced that composability, in both its early and more mature forms, has been a strategic yet rarely achieved goal for years, and not just recently, as banks have struggled to support open banking and open finance with their architectures. Given the innovation glut, composability — and hyper-composability even more so — will evolve from “strategic” factor to a “vital”one.

If you would like to discuss my perspective on TCS 2026, please feel free to contact me (GetInTouch(at)AngryRabbitGroup.com).                     

All that remains is for me to thank Temenos for the invitation to TCF 2026. Overall, the presentations at the conference were interesting, the discussions inspiring, and the details yet to be announced promising.