Temenos, the Swiss-based banking technology provider, used this year’s Temenos Community Forum to make a more product-led case for bank modernisation.

At last year’s event in Madrid, the message was that Temenos wanted to ‘build less…. but build it better’. By TCF 2026 in Copenhagen, ‘less’ appeared to come with a fairly full demo schedule.

Cloud, core modernisation, AI, trust and regulation were all still on the agenda, as you would expect. But this year felt more practical. Temenos had come to show what it had been building, rather than simply talk about where banking might go next.

“We wanted this conference to be more product heavy,” Sai Rangachari, chief product officer at Temenos, told The Fintech Times. “We wanted more demos and we wanted to balance out more vision with the demos, so people felt inspired, but also didn’t walk away thinking this is all fluff. There are real product demos behind it.”

Rangachari, who joined Temenos as chief product officer in early 2025, says the change came partly from what the company heard from banks after last year’s event.

“Last time, we heard the feedback: this is all great, the innovation is great, but I’m stuck here. How do I go from here to here so I can take advantage of all these innovations?”

That feeling ran through much of the conversation in Copenhagen. Banks may be interested in AI agents, conversational banking and more intelligent systems, but many are still working with old technology, undocumented integrations and transformation programmes that come with real operational risk.

“The whole conversation is beginning to switch from, should I modernise, to how do I modernise?” Rangachari says. “The appetite for modernisation has grown quite a bit, because it’s going to become existential.”

From listening to action

Rangachari says Temenos deliberately put more emphasis on demos and practical use cases at TCF 2026, rather than leaving the event at the level of future vision.

“At some point people get tired of you listening; they want you to act on it,” he says. “So we listened, we heard, and we invested, and we’re showcasing.”

He also says AI is changing how Temenos works internally. It is being built into products for banks, but it is also being used by Temenos’ own teams to improve how quickly products are developed and shipped.

“The pace of change has changed for us,” he says. “We’re able to deliver way more than ever before, because we are beginning to use AI internally as well, and it’s improved our shipping speed and the quality.”

For Rangachari, part of the job now is deciding where Temenos should lead, and where it needs banks in the room from the start. Some bets come from a clear view of where the market is heading; others need closer work with customers.

Conversational banking is one area where Temenos has its own conviction. In more specific operational areas, Rangachari says the company wants design partners closely involved.

“We don’t want to build those things in a silo,” he says.

Making modernisation less daunting

Composable core banking is one example. The term can make the idea sound more complicated than it needs to be, but Rangachari’s explanation is fairly simple: banks do not always have to rip everything out at once. They can change one part, prove it works, and then move on to the next.

Instead of asking a bank to replace the whole core in one large programme, the idea is to let it modernise specific functions independently.

“It’s manageable. It’s also about risk mitigation. And, it’s also about cost and time,” he says. “Instead of trying to do a full big-bang replacement, can I replace this first, and then can we go after this?”

Deposits and lending are natural starting points. They sit close to how banks make money, and Rangachari says they are two of the areas where Temenos is seeing the strongest demand.

“Banks make money primarily on two things, deposits and lending,” he says. “This is where they make their money. Now banks are beginning to make money with payments as well, and that’s why payments are seeing huge growth. But historically, it’s been deposits and lending.”

Many banks are trying to change systems that have accumulated years of fixes, tweaks and patches. Replacing one module may be the easy part. The slower work is finding out what else it touches, which changes teams made along the way, and what only a handful of people inside the bank still understand.

“For us, in a sandbox environment, it takes us two days, three days, one week, whatever,” Rangachari says. “But for a bank, it could take a year, because the complexity is not in the actual module.”

He adds: “If it was simply replacing the components, that’s easy. But you have to go and rewire every connectivity.”

This is where the modernisation conversation gets much more practical. Banks still want innovation, but they need a route that reflects the reality of their systems, rather than the neat version that appears on a slide.

“Banks are beginning to ask the question: do I have to replace the whole thing for me to go chase this growth?” he says. “That’s where our composable or point solutions come into play. We’re really saying, no, there’s no need to go replacing everything. You can update just this piece, take advantage of that innovation, and then the next piece and the next piece.”

Where AI becomes useful

AI was everywhere at TCF 2026, because of course it was. But Rangachari says the conversation has changed since last year.

“People are way more educated on AI now than last year,” he says. “Last year it was just there. We had to talk about it. Everyone talked about it, but not everyone really understood what they were talking about.”

This year, he says, more banks have actually tried it. That makes the conversation less vague. Banks are beginning to know where they want AI to help, and where they are still wary.

“There are real conversations happening around: what are you doing about this problem?” he says.

One example came from a wealth management user group, where a client asked whether AI could listen to a customer conversation and automatically surface the right order form or product information on screen in real time.

For Rangachari, this is where AI starts to become useful: pointed at a specific banking task, rather than presented as a magic layer that somehow improves everything.

Customer-facing AI tends to get the attention, but some of the more immediate gains may sit inside the bank. Employees still spend too much time moving through systems, preparing information, handling exceptions and switching between screens.

“Why should an employee go through 20 screens to create a product when you can just type in and say, create a product?” he says.

Reconciliation, sanctions screening, implementation, installation and upgrades are also areas where he sees AI supporting teams. In those cases, the aim is to reduce manual work and give specialists more time for cases that need judgement.

Trust, proof and control

Banks may like the demo. They still need to know what happens when it is running inside the actual bank.

Rangachari says trust comes in several forms. Banks want to know whether peer institutions are using a product. They want to see a business case. They also need evidence that the technology can be governed properly.

“There are three things that are non-negotiable for us,” he says. “Explainable, auditable, governed. Every decision explainable. Every action taken is auditable. And then it’s governed.”

Temenos starts AI agents in listening or advisory mode. The system can recommend an action, but the human remains responsible for deciding whether to take it. Greater autonomy comes later, if the bank chooses to allow it.

Rangachari says trust has to be built through proof, not just promises.

“Sometimes they look for trust in: do they have other banks using it?” he says. “A lot of the banks are looking for who among their peer group is utilising it. That becomes a good proof point.”

The architecture behind intelligent banking

Behind Temenos’ AI strategy sit four architectural foundations: a banking knowledge graph, conversational interfaces, model context protocol and an agentic framework.

Put more plainly, Temenos is trying to give its AI enough banking context to be useful, enough connectivity to work across systems, and enough governance to be acceptable in a regulated environment.

Temenos wants the knowledge graph to bring together its banking knowledge, including code, product configurations and information on how customers have set up their environments. Conversational interfaces change how users interact with banking software. Model context protocol helps AI models and systems find and use each other’s capabilities. The agentic framework governs and orchestrates the agents themselves.

“All of these things are useless if we cannot orchestrate them well, and we cannot govern them well,” Rangachari says.

Temenos is keen to make the point that this is embedded AI, rather than another clever layer sitting awkwardly on top of the stack. Banks tend to be wary of anything that sounds bolted on, especially when it touches core systems, compliance teams or customer channels. The real test is whether it can sit inside the way a bank already works.

Rangachari expects the next phase of banking to be hybrid. Some customers will continue to use web banking. Others will prefer mobile. Some will move towards conversational banking. Others may eventually rely on their own AI agents to interact with banks on their behalf.

For banks, that means more channels to support, not fewer. Digital banking is unlikely to collapse neatly into one new interface. The channels will stack up, while the systems underneath still need to be modernised.

The pressure to keep up

Banks are being pulled in both directions. They cannot chase every new interface or AI idea without addressing the operating model behind it. But waiting until every legacy issue has been fixed is hardly realistic either.

Rangachari sees that tension as healthy.

“If you don’t have the push and pull, then you only innovate at the pace of the back end, and that might take a long time,” he says.

The largest banks have the budgets to invest heavily in technology. Across the rest of the market, institutions are under the same pressure to improve, but often without the same depth of internal resource.

“The tier ones have billions of dollars to innovate. They will innovate, and they will invest in technology,” Rangachari says. “What about the rest of the world, the long tail? They need players like Temenos innovating, because they can take advantage of the same thing.”

His argument is that many banks need a more manageable route into change: one that lets them move piece by piece, without turning every major upgrade into a leap into the unknown.