Temenos to expand digital payments portfolio

Temenos to expand digital payments portfolio

Temenos, the banking software company, has announced that Saudi Arabian digital wallet, STCPay, has selected cloud-native, cloud-agnostic Temenos Payments and Temenos Transact running on a private cloud to achieve exponential growth and expand its digital payments capabilities.

Real-time, API-first Temenos Transact and Temenos Payments will provide a single, digital platform on which STCPay can rapidly create and update innovative digital services for retail customers. Using Temenos’ cloud and microservices-based technology to power innovation and transform customer journeys, STCPay aims to double its customer base by 2021. Longer-term, the business aims to establish itself as the leading digital challenger in the Middle East and Africa (MEA).

STCPay, a subsidiary of STC Group, is Saudi Arabia’s largest and leading mobile wallet app. Launched in late 2018 by STC, the digital challenger aims to provide new, innovative technologies and digital payment experiences to customers and facilitate transactions that are quick, easy, and secure.

Temenos Payments provides Straight-Through Processing (STP) rates over 99% and will underpin STCPay’s digital customer experiences. Temenos Payments will be integrated with Temenos Transact, the next-generation core banking product, and deployed on private cloud to provide unparalleled resilience and scalability to support skyrocketing volumes of digital payments.

Ahmed Alenazi, CEO, STCPay, said: “We are excited to partner with Temenos and unlock the vast opportunities of digital payments in the Middle East. Temenos brings to this partnership 20 years’ experience deploying advanced banking software and delivering next-generation digital experiences in Saudi Arabia. With Temenos’ market-leading technology and rich banking functionality, we aim to redefine payments, offering outstanding digital experiences that integrate into our customers’ lifestyles.”

Abdulrahman Tawfiq Almutairi, CIO, STCPay, added that: “Temenos’ cutting-edge cloud and microservices-based architecture perfectly aligns to STCPay’s growth and innovation strategies. Temenos’ unique architecture will power DevOps and support continuous innovation by facilitating faster deployments that reduce time to market for new products and services. This agile technology will enable us to remain at the forefront of digital payments innovation by helping us to quickly respond to the evolving market landscape and needs of our customers.”

Jean-Paul Mergeai, Managing Director, Middle-East and Africa Temenos, said: “It is a true privilege to embark on this exciting partnership with STCPay. We are seeing a significant increase in demand for digital payments across the Middle East and Africa region and the COVID-19 pandemic is only accelerating this trend. Our cloud-native, AI-driven software supports the exceptional digital experiences that customers want, but it also provides the business resilience and security that banks need now more than ever. As the only technology provider offering cloud-native banking software in this market, we are excited to deliver Temenos Transact and Temenos Payments and witness another use case for powerful and transformative cloud technology.”

The new platform will drive significant cost efficiency gains and enable sustainable business growth. According to the Temenos Value Benchmark, a strategic, survey-based program providing an in-depth analysis of how software capabilities impact a bank’s profitability, banks with STP rates over 90% can achieve up to 8x higher revenues per customer, compared with banks with lower STP rates.

Kelly Switt, Global Director, FSI strategy, Ecosystem and Strategic Partnerships, Red Hat, said: “Red Hat is thrilled to be a part of this collaboration with Temenos and STCPay. We believe that the next evolution of financial services will be based on open source development principles and technologies. We are grateful for the opportunity to enable both Temenos and STCPay on this evolutionary journey and look forward to being an enabler of continuous innovation.”

Temenos Saudi model bank will deliver pre-configured, country-specific capabilities and regulatory compliance to support STCPay to roll out its new platform in the shortest possible timeframe and at minimum cost. With model bank capabilities for more than 150 countries, Temenos’ software will support the seamless onboarding of new geographies across the Gulf Co-operation Council (GCC) and scale as STCPay’s business grows.

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