DreamSimplicity met with Curt Raffi, Product Marketing Director at MetraTech and Murray Gardiner, Director of Community Banking and Cloud Services at Temenos to learn more about their exciting venture into microfinance cloud deployment.
The Big News:
MetraTech, provider of agreements-based billing and compensation solutions, has partnered with Temenos, banking software systems provider, to create the first microfinance banking solution in a public cloud. This solution is Temenos's T24 core banking platform, operating on Microsoft Windows Azure. MetraTech's Metanga solution was selected to monetize T24 because of its ability to market-enable Windows Azure applications.
With so many bad banking stories, finally there is a good one. The T24 solution empowers people across the globe to open their own microfinance bank with just a computer and a web browser, bringing banking to those who need it. A fourth of the world lives on less then $1.25 a day, and most don't have a bank account. Microfinance banks give low-income households around the world, like farmers and merchants, access to affordable financial services to grow their business and improve their standard of living.
The T24 microfinance bank solution is affordable and secure. As a cloud-based service, the only infrastructure you need is literally a computer and Internet. T24 provides the banking platform and website template to easily get your microfinance institution off the ground quickly. Further, T24 is a secure core banking platform where people can feel safe managing their bank funds. The MetraTech and Temenos partnership, brought together by Microsoft's Windows Azure, is proof of the power of cloud-based services to help people and on an international level.
How did they get there?
Swiss based Temenos entered the microfinance arena with the acquisition of a small microfinance software company. Through lots of research, Temenos developed specific requirements for standard practices and products currently in the market and then developed a microfinance specific banking platform. This platform grew and improved, pushed by the needs of their clients for faster and more efficient implementation due to client time constraints and limited capacity to engage in large projects. With 12 years under their belt, Temenos has T24 running 118 microfinance banks on 40 different countries.
The move to the cloud is a first for Temenos and the product of a key partnership with MetraTech. Metanga, MetraTech's multi-tenant cloud-based billing application, allowed T24 to become a core banking software on the Windows Azure cloud, managing all aspects of its software-as-a-service (SaaS) monetization: customer enrollment, product catalogs, pricing, promotions, invoicing, customer self-care and payment capture. MetraTech is based out of Boston, with offices in San Francisco, Munich, Paris, Singapore, Rio de Janeiro and London.
