At Sibos 2025, HCLTech hosted a discussion with Temenos on the practical requirements for delivering instant, cross-border payments at scale. The conversation examined user-experience priorities, the integration of AI across payment workflows, the trust and compliance controls required and how execution-led partnerships accelerate delivery.
Seamless cross-border transactions
Asked what great looks like for cross-border and instant payments, Mick Fennell, Business Line Director - Payments at Temenos, said it should “look seamless.” The challenge, he argued, is execution across “so many different processing points” because “it takes a village to raise a payment.” In the attention economy, customers “want delivery immediately,” which demands “really, really tight integrations,” parallelized processes and real-time “fraud checking and monitoring and validations.”
For Fennell, a winning user experience consistently optimizes four levers — cost, access, speed and transparency — and accepts that perfection is a moving target. “You’re always trying to get there because there’s always something new to make it better,” he said. That’s why Temenos focuses on “integrated platforms” and deep partner connectivity. “Payments is all about how you integrate with your processing partners,” he said.
AI’s role: Infused into the product, not sitting on top
HCLTech’s latest research, Future of Payments: AI everywhere. Trust nowhere? highlights both momentum and caution: 99% of financial institutions are already using AI somewhere in operations, while 91% worry about associated risks. Fennell’s view is that AI has a “central role” and is already embedded throughout Temenos’ stack.
Practical applications span “fraud detection, the reduction of false positives, smart routing, and automated repair,” plus internal productivity, such as using AI in engineering and product management and bank-facing copilots.
Crucially, Temenos is giving clients tooling “to not just configure the models we’re delivering, but also…enhance them and build their own.” As Fennell put it, “AI is not going back in the box.”
Risk, explainability and governance: Building trust
On regulation and trust frameworks, Fennell stressed two imperatives: explainability and governance. “You can’t have a black box making decisions.” Internally, “AI governance committees” certify models before release and co-innovation programs with banks ensure solutions are developed together with users.
As rulebooks evolve, he expects supervisors to harness AI too: “I suspect the regulators will be using AI to actually assess how people are staying compliant.” The path forward is collaborative and iterative: “It’s an industry movement…we’re all still learning as we move along.”
Partnerships that de-risk and deliver
The technology or software is just 25% of success. The remaining 75% is the services and execution around it. Given the risks in implementation, transparent, well-structured partnerships with clear roles make the difference.
With HCLTech, Temenos is delivering across “core banking, payments, retail and wealth management,” combining Temenos’ “inbuilt regulatory compliance” across 150 countries with HCLTech’s “knowledge of the regulatory frameworks” and delivery scale. “You’re a key part of our ecosystem…an enormous part of how we’ve become so successful is by working with successful companies like yourselves,” he said.
The road to instant, cross-border payments
The road to truly instant, borderless payments won’t be paved by any single technology or firm. It will be co-engineered with AI embedded throughout the workflow, governance designed in from the start and partners aligning around cost, access, speed and transparency. With the right collaboration and controls, the next wave of cross-border experiences can feel effortless, no matter how complex the orchestration behind them.
