By Ron Chen, Correspondent ASEAN Region

The banking software company, Temenos, 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 per cent 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. This will provide STCPay with timely benefits in light of regional trends towards cashless banking as a result of COVID-19. According to the recent Economist Intelligence Unit report released by Temenos, 60 per cent of banking executives in MEA think cash will dip below 5 per cent of retail transactions in the next five years.

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.

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 Cooperation Council (GCC) and scale as STCPay’s business grows.

Temenos is collaborating closely with Red Hat to create a standardized cloud operating model for STCPay based on a collection of enterprise-grade, open-source technologies, including Red Hat OpenShift, Red Hat Quay, Red Hat AMQ Streams, and Red Hat Storage. The collaboration will provide STCPay with the combined strengths of market-leading cloud-native and open source technologies.

Chief Executive Officer, STCPay, Ahmed Alenazi commented: “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.”

CIO, STCPay, Abdulrahman Tawfiq Almutairi added: “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.”

Managing Director, Middle-East & Africa Temenos, Jean-Paul Mergeai 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 – 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.”

Global Director, FSI strategy, Ecosystem and Strategic Partnerships, Red Hat, Kelly Switt 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 Payments product was named Leader in the 2019-2020 IDC MarketScape for worldwide integrated payment platforms (https://bit.ly/33xgI1F) and also ranked #1 best-selling payments system in the IBS Sales League Table 2020 (https://bit.ly/34pa9xv).