The financial world has traditionally been built on systems of record and networks of trust dating back decades if not centuries. But the post pandemic financial world will increasingly depend on digital technology in general, and the cloud in particular, to power the recovery and expand access to financial products.
That is the context for the technology partnership Huawei has sealed with Geneva, Switzerland-based banking software company Temenos, announced at the Huawei Intelligent Finance Summit, 2021.
The deal means Temenos’ cloud native core banking software will be offered on Huawei’s Public Cloud. The two companies will also collaborate on sales and marketing as well as implementation and training. Geographically, the partnership covers Asia-Pacific (APAC) with a specific focus on China, and it also includes Africa, Europe, Latin America and the Middle East.
Temenos is the first core banking software provider to be certified on Huawei’s infrastructure and public cloud platform. Over 3,000 banking and financial institutions worldwide use Temenos’ cloud native software, reaching over 30 per cent of the global banking population.
Huawei already works with over 2,000 financial institutions, including almost half of the world’s top 100 banks.
Philip Barnett, Temenos’ president of strategic growth, noted that the tie-up with Huawei would “massively accelerate” its penetration of the Chinese market that worth around $6bn. Globally, our API-first, cloud-native core banking solution based on Huawei Cloud will provide banks with flexibility, agility, elasticity, and accelerate time to market. The Huawei-Temenos partnership aims to deliver new values to banks so that they can:
- Create and launch innovative solutions that really help their existing customers while also attracting new ones
- Deliver market leading efficiency, while maximising profitability
- Simplify, automate and transform bank’s core processing so they become more effective and thus can achieve world leading RoE.
The companies said the pandemic has fuelled the demand for cloud-based banking, in turn highlighting the need for banks to adopt more resilient and agile platforms. Traditional banks are increasingly adopting the cloud to enable digital transformation, reduce complexity and accelerate speed to market, while digital-first banks use the cloud to “launch fast” without huge investment in IT infrastructures.
Announcing the deal with Temenos at the Huawei Intelligent Finance Summit, Ma Yue, Executive Vice President, Huawei Enterprise Business Group (EBG) and President, Huawei EBG Global Partner Development and Sales, said it would continue to strengthen its ties with “solution competent partners” like Temenos.
“The digital ecosystem is a place where all participants create and share value together,” he said. “By strengthening partnerships, we can solve problems and create value for customers together, expand the cake, and open up new growth space for the finance industry.”
The conference, which brought 3000 global financial industry customers partners and experts together in Shanghai, highlighted how the finance industry needs to adapt as digitalization recasts traditional sectors and creates new ones.
In a keynote speech on “Global Economic Recovery: Certainty and Uncertainty”, Dr Fan Gang, Professor of Economics, Peking University; Vice President, China Society of Economic Reform, said, even though the pandemic is far from over, the digital economy will be the engine of economic recovery.
“Digital finance is the driving force of the development of the digital economy,” he continued. “It is therefore necessary to accelerate financial technology innovation, as FinTech will play a leading role in upgrading the digital transformation of thousands of industries.”
Huawei unveiled three initiatives to help financial organisations with this transition. These include encouraging institutions to fully embrace cloud native, innovative technologies that will allow them to accelerate digital and intelligent convergence and create agile platforms.
At the same time, it will work to deepening digitalization across all industry scenarios to enhance safe and secure data transfer, unlock the potential value of big data, and build out financial inclusion.
It will also work to aggregate different software as a service (SaaS) products to build an open ecosystem for all scenarios, and enable scenario-based financial services.
