EXCLUSIVE: “Travelling Light” – Heman Daswani and Sairam Rangachari, Temenos in ‘The Paytech Magazine’

Fragmented and legacy systems are weighing down banks, undermining the innovation agility that modern payments now demand, according to Temenos

For all the noise around digital transformation, payments remain the most unforgiving test of whether banks are truly modernising, or merely updating the language they use to describe themselves. Customers expect money to move instantly, securely and transparently. Consequently, regulators expect compliance in real time.

And, in the already frantic race to modernise, financial institutions, still carrying decades of accumulated technology debt, are expected to deliver both of these often conflicting priorities at scale. It is against this backdrop that banking software provider Temenos chose SIBOS 2025 in Frankfurt to unveil Money Movement & Management, its intelligent, unified platform that brings together payments processing, account management, risk and treasury into a single operating layer.

On the surface, it is simply another product launch. In context, it is a response to a deeper structural challenge facing the industry: innovation is accelerating faster than most banks’ infrastructures and governance models can comfortably keep up with. For Heman Daswani, Payments Specialist at Temenos, that tension defines the current moment.

“Before we even talk about challenges,” he says, “we must all acknowledge that we are in this golden era for payments innovation.” He is acknowledging the fact that AI, open banking, blockchain and stablecoins are no longer theoretical. They are shaping customer expectations and competitive dynamics in real time.

“The problem,” Daswani adds, “is that a lot of the critical mass of the banks is not able to move as fast and catch up with this innovation because of the legacy technology they have within their institutions.”

That technology, he argues, is neither nimble nor designed for real-time finance, and it is increasingly acting as a brake on growth. Innovation outpacing infrastructure This mismatch is most visible in payments, given their inherent challenges around customer expectations of speed and ease and sheer transactional volumes, fuelled by today’s always-on digital landscape.

Instant payments have been live for years, yet many banks still lack 24/7 cores. Real-time fraud and sanctions checks are not universal, despite the rapidly accelerating volume and complexity of threats.

“Even if they have these two things,” Daswani notes, “oftentimes they are lacking the capability to make use of the rich data that comes in the new ISO 20022 payment formats.”

The result is a patchwork of systems, each performing a narrow function, none offering end-to-end visibility or control.

“That legacy technology is like baggage that a lot of these institutions are carrying,” he says bluntly. “It’s stopping them from moving as fast as they should right now.”

Those concerns resonate strongly with what Temenos hears at board and executive level. According to Sairam Rangachari, Chief Product Officer at Temenos, the company’s conversations with banks echo that.

“We hear three things from banks all the time,” he says. “Number one is how do they reduce risk and complexity. The second is that they’re worried about the spiralling cost of operations. The third is how can they enable growth and innovation from the point of view of core banking.”

In other words, transformation is no longer about experimentation. It is about survival, efficiency and relevance all at once.

Cutting through the AI hype

AI sits at the centre of this conversation, but not always comfortably. “There’s a lot of hype,” Rangachari acknowledges. “Banks get pitched AI quite a bit these days.”

Yet when the conversation turns practical, priorities sharpen quickly.

“What we consistently hear is: can we look at AI for security? Can we look at AI for fraud monitoring? Compliance efficiencies? And of course, how do we create hyper-personalised experiences for customers?” he says.

These are not moonshot ambitions. They are grounded, operational demands, and they reflect a maturing attitude to AI across financial services. As the industry moves from pilots to production, AI is increasingly judged not on novelty, but on measurable impact. That shift is visible in payments and compliance, as volume rise, settlement windows shrink, and regulatory scrutiny intensifies. Manual review processes simply do not scale. Nor do fragmented architectures designed for batch processing in a real-time world.

One platform, four pillars Temenos Money Movement & Management is built around this reality and layers on top of the company’s existing Temenos Payments Hub, which is already used by banks globally. The integrated money movement and management platform encompasses payments processing, account management, risk and treasury capabilities. The logic is straightforward: every payments operation, whether in a bank, fintech or EMI (electronic money institution), ultimately revolves around these four pillars.

Providers need payments to process efficiently, at scale and without exceptions. They must manage customer accounts as well as internal nostro and settlement accounts. They need real-time visibility into liquidity across those accounts to ensure smooth settlement. And overarching all of this is risk management: real-time screening and fraud monitoring from a payments perspective.

By unifying these capabilities, Temenos aims to modernise not just payments technology, but the operating model that sits beneath it. AI is embedded across the workflow, automating payment repair, improving straight-through processing and reducing manual intervention. This approach extends to compliance.

Temenos’ Financial Crime Mitigation AI Agent, launched earlier in 2025 and now integrated into the platform, evaluates screening alerts in real time, achieving false-positive rates below two per cent in live deployments, compared with an industry average of five to eight per cent. In a sector where more than 40 per cent of compliance costs are tied to personnel, the implications are profound.

Fewer false positives mean fewer interrupted payments, faster settlement and better customer experiences, without compromising regulatory obligations. Compliance shifts from being a bottleneck to becoming an enabler of scale.

Agility without recklessness

Beyond efficiency, banks are also looking for room to experiment safely. Stablecoins, real-time payments and new AI-driven services are all on the agenda, but so, too, is risk containment.

“If you peel back the onion and look at what banks really, really want,” Rangachari says, “they’re looking for innovation agility. How can they experiment? How can they take new ideas to customers without having to spend too much money or worry about risk and complexity?” he asks.

“And, of course, they’re looking at a lot of efficiency plays around compliance. And AI has very, very promising ideas there.”

That balance, between speed and safety, is becoming the defining challenge of modern banking. It is also where regulation looms largest. Historically, periods of rapid innovation are followed by regulatory consolidation.

“When there is rapid disruption,” Daswani observes, “we see that the regulatory regime catches up. They start putting more and more controls, more safety nets around the responsible use of these innovations.”

In the UK, regulators have resisted AI-specific rulebooks, favouring principles-based, outcomes-focussed oversight that’s embedded in existing frameworks. In the EU, the AI Act introduces additional safeguards for risk use cases while explicitly seeking to avoid unnecessary duplication with financial regulation.

“We are still in a situation where the regulatory regime is not yet firm on all these innovative topics,” Daswani says. “We will see that shaping up, which will determine how frequently or how safely we can use these innovations in future.”

Y2K to AI: another inflection point

There is certainly an uncomfortable sense of déjà vu here. It was Y2K that last forced banks to confront the systemic risks of retaining legacy technology at scale. Artificial Intelligence is creating a similar inflection point, but with far less time to respond. Payments are already real-time. Customer expectations are already reset. Regulatory scrutiny is already intense. Temenos’ approach centres on a unified platform model. Fewer platforms, more deeply integrated.

Intelligence embedded by design, not bolted on. Compliance treated as core infrastructure, not an afterthought. For incumbents, the platform offers a way to drop the baggage without sacrificing trust. For new entrants, it accelerates time to market, too.

FINCI, an EMI regulated by the Bank of Lithuania, went live on the Money Movement & Management platform in just four months, processing thousands of payment requests per second and onboarding new payment providers in a matter of a few weeks.

The new platform is part of a new framework for the next phase of transformation, one characterised by reduced risk and complexity through unified architectures, lower operating costs via AI-driven automation, straight-through processing, innovation agility without reckless experimentation, and compliance-at-scale, embedded and explainable.

As banks navigate this ‘golden era’ of payments innovation, the question is no longer whether AI will reshape money movement, but whether existing infrastructures and governance models can keep up.

Temenos’ answer is clear: modernisation cannot be piecemeal, and AI cannot live at the edges, because in a world of instant money and adaptive regulation, where the AI is powering good and bad actors alike, standing still is no longer a neutral option: it is a strategic risk.

This article was published in The Paytech Magazine Issue #18, Page 34-35

The post EXCLUSIVE: “Travelling Light” – Heman Daswani and Sairam Rangachari, Temenos in ‘The Paytech Magazine’ appeared first on FF News | Fintech Finance.