Temenos Bets on Collaborative Innovation with New U.S. Hub

By John San Filippo

Temenos, a global leader in banking software, is deepening its commitment to the U.S. market, particularly credit unions, with the launch of an Innovation Hub in Orlando, Fla. Finopotamus met with Temenos Chief Product and Technology Officer Barb Morgan, who explained the vision and strategy behind this significant investment. The new facility is designed to foster co-design and co-innovation by bringing Temenos experts, clients, and even partners together to tackle pressing challenges in the financial services industry. 

Barb Morgan

This isn’t Temenos’ first foray into dedicated innovation spaces, Morgan explained. “It’s actually our second Innovation Hub,” she stated. “We have our first Innovation Hub in India in Chennai and what we found there was a lot of the innovation that happens more based on internal innovation kind of POC [proof of concept] type of innovation.”

The Orlando hub, however, will have a distinctly different focus. “Opening the center in Orlando is really based around being closer to our customers,” Morgan emphasized. “Being able to do co-design, co-innovation, bringing not only ourselves and our customers, but also sometimes bringing in some of our partners to really think about how we design products together. How do we really solve customer problems?”

A Hub for Customer-Centric Solutions

The core mission of the Orlando Innovation Hub is to be deeply customer-facing. Morgan discussed what this collaborative approach will look like in practice. “A lot of it’s in the design space,” she said. “We’re actually doing one at a client site this week, which will be similar to what we do in the Innovation Hub where we’re bringing our teams, both our technical teams, but also our business teams side by side with their teams to talk about the most important problems that they’re looking to solve and then designing those together.” This hands-on, agile methodology, she added, will leverage Temenos’ “expertise in the banking and the core banking space” alongside the clients’ “expertise of their customers or their members making sure that we’re solving the right problems that are top of mind.” Morgan even envisions a future with commingled teams working together on implementations and upgrades.

While the India hub focuses more on the operational side, the Orlando center will be dedicated to this kind of direct client collaboration. However, Morgan noted that “being a global organization, we always push the teams to share best practices.” This approach ensures that insights and innovations can flow between the distinct hubs. The development timeline is ambitious, with Morgan stating, “If I had it my way, it’d be yesterday, but we are hiring. We’ll use a temporary location for the short time being, but our goal is later this year.”

The Role of AI in Future Innovations

No discussion of innovation in 2025 would be complete without addressing artificial intelligence (AI). So, Morgan said there will be an AI focus at the Innovation Hub and outlined two applications the lab will explore.

“One is more the Gen AI, the copilots - things that I like to call it augmented intelligence versus artificial intelligence,” she explained. “It’s that side-by-side agent bringing the data together, but being able to ask a question in a natural language. For example, give me the last five things this customer has done with us very quickly versus the employee having to go into multiple screens and pull things up.”

The second area is agentic AI, which Morgan sees as crucial for member safety. “A lot of the agentic AI that that we’re seeing in the industry is more around keeping customers and members safe, for example from fraud. Maybe fraud has caused a debit to come out of the account. How can we quickly repair that and get the money back into the account, so the customer doesn’t have to call in and go through a painful process? It’s almost instantaneous.”

Looking ahead, Morgan predicts a normalization of AI’s role. “I see this AI hype settling down and really solving customer problems,” she shared. “And now that people are more comfortable with AI being in their lives, the conversations are turning to how can we actually solve real problems that are top of mind?” These solutions might not always be “the shiny new things,” but could involve practical applications like enabling real-time payment updates across legacy systems, she added.  

The establishment of the Orlando Innovation Hub signals Temenos’ strategic intent to drive innovation through close collaboration with its U.S. client base and, according to Morgan, the fintech promises tailored solutions and a strengthened partnership with the nation’s credit unions and banks.