Temenos Continues Digitization of its Investor Servicing Portal

Temenos continues to build up its investor servicing portal to cater to asset managers looking to digitize. It aims to provide a full-digital experience for clients to service potential new investors.

Sern Tham, product director at Temenos Multifonds, says the Switzerland-based banking software company has already built an investor servicing portal using a microservices architecture. Still, there is plenty room to improve.

“To me, the industry is quite early in the adoption of these digital experiences. So all we’re talking about right now is literally enabling a fully digital experience for a client to be able to service a potential investor coming in, to be able to submit a KYC/AML [know-your-customer and anti-money laundering] request, check on the status of that, and so forth,” he says.

He adds that enabling that isn’t “rocket science.”

The portal’s features could be grown by increasing self-service and the digitization of the customer experience across asset management and fund services. 

“When you then think about where else that could go, allowing increasing levels of investors self-servicing and checking their portfolio positions each day, that’s something you expect in an e-trade kind of world, but unfortunately, you don’t necessarily have that for funds today. So having technologies like that, to me, there’s quite a lot of runway we can go to helping the asset manager community bring this digital customer experience to life,” Tham says. 

For Temenos, this means bringing together all its capabilities, including its multi-experience development platform (MXDP) Quantum, and Explainable AI, a platform that provides transparency into AI applications that banks use. Temenos Multifonds is expanding its product coverage to support all key fund and investor servicing interactions, including the investor onboarding process, investor statements and confirmations, Tham says.

As for development work on the platform, he adds that the scope of work is not “massively complex.” Temenos Multifonds has been the book-of-record platform covering investor transfers, transfer agency function, or the middle and back office. 

Tham says Temenos built an app using a microservices architecture and then added a modern UX built using Quantum. 

MXDPs, which facilitate UX design and development, are used to build unified digital experiences across all channels, including mobile apps, intelligent chatbots, conversational apps and wearables. 

Temenos acquired Quantum through its purchase of Kony, a digital banking software-as-a-service company, last year. Temenos is using Quantum to keep its UX up to date across all its products. Tham says Temenos Multifonds has already started this process. A majority of the initial work has been on broadening its REST API coverage. He adds that clients can expect updates to the UI in its next release.  

“Built on top of a modern, microservices architecture, this means that as long as you have the requisite REST APIs to work with, we can support the use case easily. Fund managers still need to do the work of ensuring the user journeys are comprehensive, fit for purpose, and easy to use of course,” he adds. 

It’s important to have sufficient REST APIs to support all cases of data exchange clients need, Tham says. For example, when a firm is onboarding new investors, it will need APIs to take in all of the investor identifying information, all the investment information, and the KYC/AML details to pass through its platform or other services. 

“If you’ve got that coverage in place, you can essentially build and deploy an application as fast as you’d like. Ultimately, that’s all you’re doing—you’re enabling your clients to interact with your product in a new way. And having REST APIs in place unlocks that,” he says.