More than 1,300 banking and technology attendees joined Temenos, the Geneva-based banking software provider, in Copenhagen this May for its annual customer and partner forum.
Held at the Bella Center from 5 to 7 May, Temenos Community Forum 2026 – TCF ’26 – covered new launches across AI, SaaS and composable banking, with a focus on practical bank modernisation.
Temenos used the event to launch new products across SaaS, composable banking and embedded AI, while customer and partner sessions pointed to a common theme: banks want to move faster, but not at the expense of trust, resilience or regulatory confidence.
Opening his first forum as CEO, Takis Spiliopoulos framed those choices as higher-stakes than ever.
“The margin for error is smaller than ever,” Spiliopoulos said. “Decisions about what to change and what to protect carry much greater consequences.”
That set the tone for a forum where AI sat high on the agenda, but the more practical discussion was often about resilience, governance, implementation and how banks modernise without disrupting the systems they already rely on.
1. AI is now part of the modernisation case
AI dominated much of the discussion at TCF ’26, but Temenos did not present it as a standalone technology story. Instead, the company linked AI directly to the need for cleaner architecture, better data structures and more modern banking platforms.
Spiliopoulos made the point in his opening keynote, arguing that AI adoption in banking comes with a higher bar than in many other sectors.
“Banking isn’t like other industries,” he said. “It underpins life-changing decisions. Banking has one of the highest thresholds for AI adoption.”
Will Moroney, chief revenue officer at Temenos, made a similar point, suggesting that AI is prompting conversations with larger banks that may previously have been unlikely to consider major core change.
“There are certain banks you just would write off as a vendor like ours,” Moroney said. “We’d say, well, they’re never going to change their core.”
That view is changing, he argued, because AI depends on more open systems, reliable data and explainable decision-making.
“The large banks have now realised that they can’t get on the AI train unless they really do modernise,” Moroney said.
The same message came through in a technology partner panel, moderated by Sai Rangachari, chief product officer at Temenos. Shireesh Thota, corporate vice president, Azure Databases at Microsoft, said data strategy has become central to any serious AI strategy.
“There’s no AI without data,” Thota said.
He warned that without real-time operational context, knowledge structures and trustworthy data, banks risk deploying AI that produces “wrong answers – very confident, but absolutely nonsensical.”
2. Temenos wants AI inside the products banks already use
Temenos used TCF ’26 to launch a series of AI-powered capabilities across its core, digital banking and financial crime products. The company’s message was that banks do not need a separate AI layer sitting outside their main systems; they need intelligence built into the workflows they already run.
Rangachari set out that positioning during a session on intelligent core.
“It’s not a separate product, it’s not a layer that you buy and bolt on,” he said. “It is intelligence systematically embedded into the products that you already have.”
The new AI capabilities announced at TCF included Conversational Studio for Digital, Temenos Copilot for Workbench, Temenos Copilot for Core for branch manager and branch officer personas, and the Temenos FCM AI Agent for Instant Payments.
Conversational Studio for Digital is a natural-language environment for building digital banking journeys. In a live demo, Temenos showed how a user could generate a retail banking experience, connect it to Temenos Fabric APIs, make design changes, check accessibility and push code into a development pipeline.
Temenos Copilot for Workbench is designed for developers and implementation teams, helping them plan, build and execute custom platform extensions. Temenos Copilot for Core extends conversational support to branch managers and officers, while the FCM AI Agent for Instant Payments brings financial crime controls into real-time payment flows.
The underlying architecture was also a major part of the story. Temenos talked about four foundations for intelligent banking: a banking Knowledge Graph, conversational interfaces, model context protocol and an agentic framework.
Rangachari said orchestration and governance decide whether those tools can work in a banking environment. “All of these things are useless if we cannot orchestrate them well, and we cannot govern them well,” he said.
He also described auditability and explainability as central to Temenos’ approach to agents. “Every action they take is auditable,” Rangachari said. “Every decision they make is explainable.”
3. Composable banking is becoming the practical route into core change
Core modernisation remained one of the main themes of TCF ’26. Temenos launched composable retail deposits and composable retail lending, two cloud-native standalone capabilities designed to help banks modernise specific areas of the core independently.
The aim is to let banks modernise deposits and lending without committing immediately to a full core replacement. Each capability has its own functional boundaries and deployment cycle, and can integrate into existing technology through APIs and event-driven connections.
For Temenos, this sits within a broader push towards progressive modernisation. Rather than replacing everything at once, banks can upgrade capability by capability, allowing old and new systems to coexist during transition.
Barb Morgan, chief product and technology officer at Temenos, said the demand for this approach reflects a lower appetite for large, all-in-one transformation programmes.
“We’re seeing more and more banks who know that they are going to have to modernise,” she said. “That big bang, or all-in-one modernisation, the appetite for that, both from a speed perspective but also a complexity perspective, isn’t as high.”
Moroney, chief revenue officer at Temenos, also linked progressive modernisation to cost. Banks, he said, are paying closer attention to how much budget goes into maintaining older systems rather than creating new capability.
“What they’re starting to look at now is, instead of going on the four-year project, getting a result at the end of that, we’re going to do a sidecar, or we’re going to do a call-out,” he said.
4. SaaS and cloud deployment are widening the options
Temenos also used TCF to expand its SaaS offering on Amazon Web Services, adding digital banking and payments to its existing core banking SaaS on AWS. The company said this gives banks the option to deploy core banking, digital banking and payments as Temenos SaaS on AWS, either as individual components or as a broader end-to-end service.
The AWS announcement fits with a wider message around deployment choice. Temenos said banks can adopt individual components, choose an end-to-end enterprise service, or combine both, depending on their needs and existing systems.
Morgan described this as part of giving banks more options around how they modernise.
“You modernise on your terms,” she said. “You deploy your way – on-prem, cloud, SaaS, some of you even hybrid – but all with regulatory frameworks and the security built right in.”
Several customer announcements at TCF also reflected this cloud and modernisation strategy.
Reliance Bank, a specialist UK retail and business bank owned by The Salvation Army, selected Temenos SaaS to support its digital transformation. The bank will adopt core banking, digital and payments on Temenos SaaS, replacing legacy systems and using Temenos’ UK Model Bank to support faster product development.
First Abu Dhabi Bank extended its collaboration with Temenos in Saudi Arabia. The bank is implementing Temenos Core Banking, Payments Hub and Data Hub on cloud infrastructure in the Kingdom to support Islamic banking operations across retail, SME and corporate segments.
Temenos also announced that Pakistan’s HBL has gone live on Temenos Core Banking in the first phase of a large modernisation programme. Once fully rolled out, the programme is expected to cover HBL’s branch network and more than 40 million accounts, processing around 20 million transactions per day.
5. Governance is becoming part of the AI build, not a later check
Trust was the first word in this year’s TCF theme, and it appeared throughout discussions on AI, cloud, financial crime, resilience and regulation.
For banks, the question is not only whether AI can improve productivity or customer experience. It is whether AI can operate inside environments where decisions must be explainable, activity must be auditable and human oversight must be clear.
During the technology partner panel, Sebastian Weir, AI transformation leader at IBM Consulting EMEA, warned against getting distracted by every new model or frontier development.
“It’s very easy to get distracted with the latest development, the latest frontier technology,” he said, “but that’s not where change sits.”
He said organisations moving from pilots to production need to focus on customer outcomes, colleague experience and the core systems they are responsible for.
The EU AI Act also came up during panels and press briefings. Morgan said Temenos is already seeing more questions from banks’ internal risk teams as AI moves closer to production environments involving customer data.
“As more AI adoption into production that is touching customer data grows, I think that’s where the regulators will come in,” she said.
Dr Jochen Papenbrock, EMEA head of financial technology at Nvidia, also discussed open-source models, sovereignty and the infrastructure needed to run AI efficiently. He said open-source models can give institutions more choice over where models run, including on-premises, in the cloud or through sovereign cloud providers.
“Open source helps a lot,” he said. “Embrace open source.”
The bigger picture
TCF ’26 made clear that Temenos is tying its AI strategy closely to core modernisation, cloud deployment and composable banking.
The launches give banks more options, but they also point to the same underlying issue: AI in banking will depend on how well institutions can connect data, govern decisions and update older systems without disrupting day-to-day operations.
