Temenos, a global leader in enterprise software for banks and financial services, has a significant presence in the Cambodian market, with over 20 financial institutions in the Kingdom currently utilising a Temenos banking platform.
At a recent Temenos Connect event held at the Raffles Hotel Le Royal in Phnom Penh, B2B Cambodia sat down with Frankie Wai, Business Solution Director at Temenos, to better understand the role the banking technology provider plays in the modernisation of Cambodia’s financial sector.
Headquartered in Geneva, Switzerland, Temenos has been in the financial banking industry for more than 30 years, with a focus on providing banking software solutions and a singular platform for all banks to use around the world.
“What I'm talking about is a single platform that can support all banking segments, such as retail, corporate, wealth, and payments,” said Wai. “It supports from small-sized banks to large-sized ones with 100 million accounts. We also support all different kinds of deployment on the cloud, SaaS (software as a service) and also on-premises, and we support all geographical locations, so this is really a single platform for all banks.”
How is Temenos Supporting Cambodia’s Banking Landscape?
Speaking more on Temenos’ presence in Cambodia, Wai explained that the company has a range of clients in the country covering commercial banks (such as ACLEDA Bank and Canadia Bank), specialised banks (such as AEON Specialised Bank) and also microfinance institutions (such as LOLC).
“Our solutions cover [the broad] banking landscape, including core processing, payments, accounting, and also digital funds, the front-end, touch points, trade finance, treasury. This is the landscape we cover in Cambodia,” he said.
Temenos also supports banks as they explore integrating emerging technologies, such as artificial intelligence (AI) for AI-assisted banking.
“There is a lot of potential [in this area] and Temenos has been providing emerging technology that banks can leverage and add value to their business offering,” added Wai.
In terms of cybersecurity support, Wai shared that Temenos takes on a philosophy of ‘security by design’ and offers specialised solutions with built in high security standards.
He said:
Cambodia is already taking a lot of initiative [in the area of cybersecurity], and this boils down to the regulator, how they define the security requirements, the compliance standards, and the framework, which also promotes knowledge… to govern and monitor cybersecurity.
“We maintain a very high standard on security, in particular to the ISO 27 series (ISO 27000 family of standards), and the SOC 1,2,3,” he added. “We also take into consideration data privacy. In Europe, we have the GDPR and we have a similar framework for Asia. All these measures we put into place and make sure we keep up to date, complying with the standards that support banks to measure on this cybersecurity.”
Banking Modernisation in Cambodia and Beyond
One of the biggest challenges Wai has seen banks face in the modernisation process is transitioning away from their legacy banking platforms to more modern ones.
“[The transition], it is not just on a single [level], we’re talking about multiple [levels]. The phase of the project, the impact of the change, and also the personnel involved, all of these factors come together,” said Wai.
“We need to take a top-down approach and also consider the strategy of how banks want to transform. Do they want to make a big bang, progressively renovate the system, or build and migrate? The strategy needs to be defined in the first place, and from the top-down, it’s a whole company matter,” he added.
Reflecting on the progress Cambodia’s banking and finance sector has made to modernise and go digital, Wai said he believes the country has already taken a lot of initiative and proved itself to be successful in its adoption of new technologies.
I think Cambodia has really already taken a lot of initiative, like in [the development of] instant payments, and also the Bakong blockchain digital currency, which is really a frontier [technology], and has really proven very successful in terms of its inclusivity and scalability, and also helped to reduce costs, particularly for the end customers.
In terms of where Cambodia is going next, Wai sees financial institutions shifting their focus largely to cloud adoption and AI.
“What I see next for the Cambodian market, or already on the move, is cloud adoption. Why? Because cloud really enables a bank to scale and to innovate… which is also relevant to how banks are enabled to use AI, because AI concerns data analysis and computation power,” he said.
“With cloud adoption as the foundation, banks can leverage and apply AI to provide personalised, innovative and also differentiating bank offerings to the customers. So I think these are the two areas, cloud and AI-assisted banking, where I see there are good opportunities in the Cambodian market,” Wai concluded.