Orient Commercial Bank selects T24 to support Vietnamese growth strategy

GENEVA, Switzerland, 21 September 2009 – Temenos (SIX: TEMN), the global provider of integrated core banking systems, today announced that Orient Commercial Bank (OCB), a leading joint stock commercial bank in Vietnam has selected TEMENOS T24 (T24) to consolidate and support its entire retail and corporate banking operations, servicing 300,000 accounts across 70 branches.

OCB is pursuing an aggressive growth strategy in the Vietnamese retail banking sector, with plans to increase its branches to 135 and service over a million accounts in the next four years. T24 will provide a single, flexible platform to deliver greater transparency of management data for more informed decision making to improve customer service, monitor performance and manage risk. And, integrating its operations will immediately drive down maintenance costs for the bank.

Mr. Tran Van Vinh, CEO, OCB, comments: “International players are raising the stakes in the Vietnamese banking sector by changing customer expectations. With over 40 banks in operation, competition is extremely intense and we needed the best possible technology in order to compete. Temenos was the obvious choice to provide a core banking platform with the pre-configured international best practice processes that we required. It holds an excellent reputation in Vietnam in terms of both product and local support capability, which were key factors in our search for the right supplier”.

Over the last seven years, Temenos has developed a strong and loyal client base and has invested in building its regional support capabilities, with a dedicated office in Hanoi. Temenos’ Vietnamese client list includes Techcombank and Sacombank, both long standing T24 users. Over the past 3 years, Vietnamese banks that run on Temenos have grown market share by more than 7 percentage points and for the last five years have increased operating profit by a compound annual rate of 79%.*

Techcombank, the third largest private commercial bank in Vietnam, has increased its use of T24 since implementing the software in 2003 to take advantage of new functionality, such as ARC CRM. Year on year, T24 has supported its rapid growth from 13 to 170 branches and helped the bank generate a 225% profit increase last year. Sacombank, a leading premier bank in Vietnam, has also extended its relationship with Temenos since signing in 2004 in support of its international growth strategy.

“Our mission is to become the largest private commercial bank in Vietnam and maintain our position as a leading bank in technological innovation. T24 has transformed the way we do business and set us in good stead to achieve our 2009 growth plans. We have significantly improved and extended our internet banking services and as a result are on target to increase our online client base by 50% this year. T24’s regular upgrade path has delivered continuous support for our product strategy, allowing us to rapidly roll out new lines including regular savings accounts and visa cards. This will help meet our objective to grow our retail customer base to one million by the end of 2009”, comments Mr Minh, IT Vice Director, Techcombank. Mr. Dang Van Thanh, Chairman of Sacombank says: “To achieve our global growth target we need efficient product and service diversification and systems centralisation at a reduced cost of ownership. To date T24 has provided us with improved operational efficiencies, reinforcing our reputation as Vietnam’s premier bank and we extended our partnership in full confidence that T24 shall help us drive our business forward globally”.

Chris Longden, Regional Director, APAC, Temenos comments: “Temenos’ pre-configured T24 Model Bank product continues to appeal to a wide range of banks as it reduces implementation time and supports fast go to market strategies, as well as offering full support to those with international operations. Our significant growth in Vietnam underscores our strategy to gain strong market share across Asia Pacific and become the core banking systems vendor of choice throughout the region”.
* Reuters; Banker Database; Company accounts; Temenos client register
About Temenos T24
T24 Model Bank is packaged core banking software which includes banking best practices based on Temenos’ implementations in over 600 financial institutions and 120 countries across the Retail, Corporate, Universal, Private Wealth, Islamic and Microfinance and Community banking sectors. Its highly automated approach delivers short implementations, guarantees lower cost of ownership with rapid and measurable ROI. T24 allows banks to replace a large number of disparate legacy systems, thereby streamlining their operations. Banks around the world use T24 to rapidly deliver innovative, market-driven products and services tailored to meet the changing needs of their customers. T24 enables banks to deliver growth, while managing risk and cost, and ensuring that they remain ahead of the competition with the most efficient and economical business model in the market.

T24 provides banks with unparalleled richness in functionality on an integrated, Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), with front- to-back office support and is fully enabled for standard Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) web services, and BPEL (Business Process Execution Language). Temenos’ total commitment to open standards enables its customers to benefit from the latest advances in technology, ensuring business agility, continuity, data
integrity and reduced downtime, all resulting in a significant, immediate and ongoing ROI (Return On Investment).

About Orient Commercial Bank
Orient Commercial Bank founded in 1996 with charter capital stands at USD 90 million and a network of 70 braches and sub-branches across Vietnam. OCB direction is to become one of the leading retail banks (group 1) in Vietnam with fast, secure and stable development, aiming at clients such as small and medium enterprises and Individuals who need the best banking utilities and services.

About Sacombank
Saigon Thuong Tin Commercial Joint Stock Bank (Sacombank) founded in 1991 has now emerged as a premier bank in Vietnam. As a pioneering private sector commercial bank, it has deployed cutting edge technology and superior service delivery to build competitiveness and to meet banking needs of corporate and retail customers.

Sacombank charter capital stands at USD 307 billion. This has enabled the Bank to increase its presence in the market. It has considerable clout in reaching out to customers through an operational network to more than 240 branches and sub-branches across 45/63 cities and provinces of Vietnam. Sacombank’s mission is to be a regional bank of first customer choice. Its objective is to build sound customer franchises across distinct business lines and become the preferred provider of banking services to its target segments. Over the years, Sacombank has made landmark strides in this journey. The Bank was named "Best Bank in Vietnam 2008" awarded by the international organizations that are Global Finance and FinanceAsia.

About Techcombank
Techcombank currently is the third largest joint stock banks in Vietnam. Founded in 1993, Techcombank now has registered capital of VND 5,400 billions (USD 300 million) and total assets of over 59,360 billions dong (USD 3.726 billions), as at 31 December 2008. The bank employs nearly 4,000 staff and has a network of 170 branches and transactional offices spreading through Vietnam. With a clearly defined banking technology strategy implemented ahead of many competitors, Techcombank now has many competitive advantages in providing an extensive range of advanced banking products and services to more than 800,000 individual customers and 30,000 of corporate and SME customers. Techcombank is the first bank in Vietnam to successfully implement the upgrade of its core banking system from TEMENOS GLOBUS to TEMENOS T24, Release 7. The Bank is one of the leading banks in Vietnam in terms of effectively applying a technology focused strategy to the bank's daily operations and management. The Bank sees technology as a platform to deliver fast, accurate, and high value-added services for its customers.

About Temenos
Founded in 1993 and listed on the Swiss Stock Exchange (SWX: TEMN), Temenos Group AG is a global provider of banking software systems in the Retail, Corporate & Correspondent, Universal, Private, Islamic and Microfinance & Community banking markets. Headquartered in Geneva with 52 offices worldwide, Temenos serves over 700 customers in more than 120 countries. Temenos’ software products provide advanced technology and rich functionality, incorporating best practice processes that leverage Temenos’ experience in over 600 implementations around the globe. Temenos’ advanced and automated implementation approach, provided by its strong Client Services organisation, ensures efficient and low-risk core banking platform migrations. Temenos annually invests around 20% in R&D, significantly more than its peers, into a single fully packaged upgradeable software release, which ensures all Temenos customers benefit from modern technology and support indefinitely. Temenos is top of the IBS Sales League Table 2008, winner of the Best Core Banking Product category in Banking Technology magazine’s Readers’ Choice Awards 2008 and is listed in the American Banker top 100 FinTech companies.