By Khalil Garriott
Tech continues to disrupt the role of banks in the financial ecosystem. With all banks aspiring to keep up, reliance on partners is a savvy strategy to mitigate disruptions and allow banks to do what they do best: serve their customers and communities.
This article is part of ABA Banking Journal’s bank tech trends for 2025 special report.
“Over the next 20-30 years, you’re not necessarily buying the product,” says David Roller, SVP and chief information officer of Kansas City, Missouri-based Commerce Bank. “You’re buying the partner.”
The significance of the prospective provider’s human approach also extends to the customer. The future of banking is digitalization. It’s also the present; 71 percent of Americans prefer to bank through web or mobile. Just as banks must adapt, so, too, must third-party vendors. For example, delivering a leaner and greener capability — reducing the environmental footprint of its digital platforms — is a priority on the Temenos product roadmap. Any technology enhancements coming down the pike should be oriented toward driving financial institutions’ digital evolutions.
Commerce Bank has been on a transformation journey, Roller says. Even with major tech upgrades now in place, he says, being able to interact with a real-life bank employee “still matters to us, especially when you’re dealing with wealth clients.”
For Commerce Bank, one partner in helping the human element differentiate through a modern-day customer experience has been Temenos. One focus at both Temenos and Commerce Bank has been how outdated internal architectures can hurt the customer experience. The Europe-based global technology provider announced multiple product releases and new features earlier this year. (Because of the company’s cloudbased architecture, clients worldwide access these new services. “These investments that we make are on a single code base — so they are for everyone,” says Tony Coleman, chief technology and innovation officer at Temenos.)
Roller says that Commerce Bank and Temenos have a shared future vision of how bank technology supports the people in the bank. “When the problems come, how does the team pull in a common direction?” he asks. “We invest in culture to drive results, and we believe that differentiates us.”
That’s a theme echoed by Azfar Karimuddin, Temenos’ new chief cloud officer. He’s seen both sides of the equation, having been a banker in Canada for more than 20 years. Now on the supplier side specializing in tech infrastructure, he mentions a tactic employed by Temenos to combat the regulatory tsunami: adding employees who have previously run banking operations — people who “understand banking regulations well enough to get ahead of them.”
“Banking has never been more challenging,” Karimuddin says. “We’re seeing the regulators becoming more and more concerned with how FIs are serving their end clients. And a year from now, we’re going to see much more stringent requirements for banks.
“Gone are the days when banks need to be worried about servers, fiber cables and networks. In the next three to five years, there’s going to be a total shift in taking out the commodity from technology, and the big giants are going to make that at scale and available to everybody.”
He cites resiliency and stability as two of his group’s core tenets, adding that Temenos is shifting its mindset from a product company to a service provider.
“The one common denominator between everybody is technology,” says Karimuddin, who has been a part of the core selection process twice on the bank side. “What Temenos brings to the table is … we get the voice of the client into the development process.”
By operationalizing technology across the enterprise, Karimuddin says financial institutions can increase efficiencies.
“A traditional credit union or traditional regional bank would be, maybe, an 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. operation — at best,” he says. “There’s no way they’re about to become a 24/7 operation. And that’s what SaaS allows you to become — at a much more effective cost. At scale, no FI can do it alone.”
Nationally, U.S. banks spend more than $181 billion on products and services each year. Banks need these products and services to carry out their mission. A current trend among North American banks is moving toward SaaS solutions.
“You think about the resources required to run a bank, and you can now deploy them to do what we call growth and innovation,” says Grace Chen, Temenos’ VP for U.S. new business and sales strategy. “What we’re seeing is banks saying to us, ‘You all run the software as a service for us because that’s what you do.’”
Collaborating with a tech partner can not only modernize a bank’s tech stack, it also can be a differentiator in a competitive market. “With modern banking platforms that leverage advanced technologies like cloud, AI and APIs, banks can accelerate innovation and adapt swiftly to market changes and customer demands,” Chen says.
A recent example of a bank aiming for that differentiation happened when Reading Cooperative Bank in Reading, Massachusetts, led by ABA Chair Julie Thurlow, selected KlariVis for its enterprise data and analytics solutions in July. It was an educated bet that that KlariVis would help transform Reading Cooperative’s data into actionable insights.
“Through my work across the industry, I am familiar with a lot of solutions,” Thurlow says. “KlariVis stood at the forefront of providing robust analytics and timely data, and we are thrilled to have them as our data partner.”
It’s a vastly different era of banking technology right now — one that Karimuddin calls “a very exciting journey.”
“Technology infrastructure is becoming a commodity, and applications are becoming the specialization and unique experience that clients are looking for,” he says. “Technology providers like Temenos are going to have to play a very active role in showing we can provide similar service on top of that commodity service for banking.”
