Good afternoon, everyone. My name is Adam Snyder. I'm Director of Corporate Affairs for Temenos. Thank you very much for joining us for our 2026 Capital Markets Day, both for the people in the room and those joining us via the webcast. We have a pretty packed agenda. You'll be hearing from Takis on strategy, Barb on product and technology, Will on go-to-market and customer success. We will give you a coffee break. After that, you'll hear from Jayde on people and culture, and finally, Takis to wrap up on our financial framework and FY 2028 targets. We will be taking Q&A at the end. If I could ask you to hold your questions until then.
For anyone joining via the webcast, you can submit your questions via the platform, and I will pick them up live in the room and direct them to the executives. With no further ado, I'll hand straight over to Takis to kick us off.
Thanks, Adam. It's great to be with you here in London for my first Capital Markets Day as CEO. Many of you will know me from my tenure as CFO. Today I have two objectives. One, reflect clearly on the progress we have made, and two, I share how I see Temenos' next phase of growth. As you have seen with our full year 2025 results, it has been a busy and productive first 12 months of our strategy. We have remained 100% focused on execution, leading to considerable progress and delivery of results ahead of our plan. Our addressable market remains resilient, and our win rates are strong. Importantly, the conversations we are having with clients reinforce our strategic direction. We have made robust investments in our platform and our product and go-to-market, as well as making progress on our U.S. expansion.
This remains a strategic priority for Temenos. I will come back to these points in more detail later. Let me start with our vision and mission that you see here. They shape our product roadmap, our investments, and how we show up for our clients. For Temenos, modernization is about helping banks to deliver absolute reliability while continually evolving. That balance is difficult, and it's why Temenos has been able to support banks and financial institutions for over 30 years in a highly complex and ever-changing landscape. When we say leading banking forward, our ambition is clear. It means being a company that executes with precision, operates with integrity, and innovates with purpose, focusing investment on areas that genuinely improve client outcomes. We provide a unified platform that helps banks scale with faster time to market and higher levels of automation, and more personalized and impactful experiences for their customers.
Ultimately, it means Temenos sets the gold standard in products, technology, and delivery. We give banks the foundation they can rely on and the freedom and confidence to move forward at their own pace without disruption. I'll now turn to Temenos today and our strong foundations. We have a broad platform that is fully integrated front to back. In our platform, core banking contributes over 80% of our product revenue, and digital another 11%. In terms of our reach, we are present in more than 150 countries, and we are particularly strong in Western Europe and emerging markets, with a good presence in all the mature markets as well, like Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and a growing footprint in the U.S., which is, as you know, a strategic growth focus for us.
We provide support across all the banking domains, primarily in retail and wealth, and increasingly in corporate banking. Across all of this, we offer customers choice across deployment models: on-premise, private and public cloud, hybrid, and SaaS. Lastly, we have a large global customer base, which continues to grow and modernize with us. We have been a leader in the IBS Intelligence Sales League Table for over 20 years, showing the trust banking clients have placed in Temenos. I want to say a few words about our leadership team. I am confident we have the right team in place to deliver our strategic roadmap. This is a group with deep industry expertise, strong execution discipline, and a shared commitment to a culture of accountability, empowerment, and performance. Importantly, this team was instrumental in developing and owning our strategic plan presented in November 2024.
You will hear directly from Barb, Will, and Jayde today. Beyond the executive committee, we have continued to strengthen leadership across the organization. Across Temenos, the focus is consistent: disciplined execution, long-term value creation, and maintaining the trust of our clients, our partners, our people, and our shareholders. That underpins everything you will hear today. Turning to our market opportunity. Our market remained resilient, very resilient in the past year, driven by non-discretionary banking IT spending. It grew 7% last year to around $25 billion, and we significantly outgrew it with 12% product revenue growth. We expect the market to continue to grow at roughly 7% per annum to $30 billion by 2028. Tier one and two banks account for close to 1/3 of the market and tend to prefer composable core and best-of-breed ideas and solutions.
Tier 3 to Tier 5 banks represent the majority of banks globally and account for two-thirds of the market in dollar terms. These banks typically have smaller in-house teams and tend to buy front-to-back best-of-breed solutions. Going forward, around 40% of the growth will come from adoption of third-party software, and the balance will be driven by growth in business volumes and shift in deployment model from on-premise to cloud and to SaaS, where total contract values, as you know, are 2 to 2.5 times higher. Our ambition is to continue to grow faster than the market, as we have done in 2025. In terms of deployment model, on-premise remains the most prevalent mode. However, public cloud and SaaS will increase in the mix as they are growing significantly faster, with public cloud growing 15% per annum and SaaS growing 11% per annum.
The shift to cloud is driven by scalability, efficiency, and the speed of change and innovation it offers, along with increasingly mature regulatory guidance. SaaS demand continues to remain stronger in tier three to tier five banks, and they see it as a viable route to the cloud and a way to lower time to market and TCO. The structural drivers supporting the demand for third-party software remain strong. We shared these trends at the last Capital Markets Day, so, let's now take a look at how they have evolved. First, cost optimization remains a priority as banks look to protect profitability and to fund innovation. They continue to modernize legacy solutions and simplify the application landscape to lower TCO. They are also digitizing more products, even the more complex ones like lending, to reduce the cost to serve. Second, digital customer experience remains a key differentiator.
Our top priority is improving onboarding conversion as the fight for deposits intensifies. There is a strong focus on payments innovation due to the continued threat from non-incumbents, and as instant payments increasingly become standard for customers. Third, security and regulatory compliance. With rising cyber threats and fraud sophistication, we're seeing elevated investments towards mitigating these risks, and especially the use of AI in financial compliance. At the same time, regulatory changes continue to drive demand for out-of-the-box compliance that stays up to date. Finally, there is greater expectation to leverage newer technologies to drive business value. There is increasing interest to deploy AI across domains to better serve customers, improve efficiency, and lift productivity, and to better manage risks. However, and very important to note, AI adoption thresholds in banking remain very high.
We see more mission-critical workloads move to the public cloud and sustained appetite, particularly from large banks, for composable core solutions that enable incremental transformation. Now, moving to our strategy. We made strong progress in the first 12 months of our strategy across product, GTM, and the U.S., and this is already translating into tangible results. We have made significant targeted investment, partly self-funded by our cost savings. In product, we transitioned to an agile team structure and strengthened the organization by bringing in new senior talent. As a result, in 2025, we delivered on our platform and product roadmap and launched differentiated new products, some of which are AI-enabled. We also sharpened our focus on the core and simplified our portfolio, including the sale of Multifonds.
Turning to GTM, we increased quota carrier headcount by 60% to over 140 individuals and invested in our sales operations and sales enablement. This has driven pipeline expansion globally, significant levels of signings with new logos, and continued momentum with existing customers. You will hear more about this from Will later. We placed strong emphasis on our U.S. expansion with a successful opening of the Orlando Innovation Hub. We hired more than 70 developers focused on U.S. product and increased U.S. sales count to over 20 individuals. These investments are strengthening our co-innovation with U.S. clients and driving our U.S. pipeline growth. We outgrew the market in the first year of our plan, in line with our ambition to do so every single year. At the outset of our plan, we identified 21 strategic growth areas across the three growth levers.
These have not changed. Some of the key revenue growth areas include Tier 3 and lower-end Tier 2 US regional banks, Tier 3 banks in Western Europe, retail core banking for Tier 1 and Tier 2 banks in Western Europe and the U.S., wealth in Europe, MIA core banking, and some more. In the last 12 months, we have made significant R&D and GTM investments across these opportunities, which has increased our ability to win. As a result, we are showing strong ARR pipeline growth across the vast majority of our growth areas. Our right to win at Temenos is validated by both the industry and by the tangible outcomes we deliver for our clients. We can demonstrate the significant value our customers can generate by using our platform, which Will is going to talk about in detail later.
Over the past year, our strategic investments in GTM and product localization have further expanded our unmatched functionality, allowing us to serve clients of every size in over 150 countries. This breadth is reflected in the delivery and diversity and scale of our key deal wins in 2025, spanning all geographies and tiers. Our market-leading cloud and SaaS capabilities continue to set the benchmark, underpinning a 75%+ win rate against our top three competitors and securing our number one position in the IBS Intelligence Sales League Table across 13 categories. Together, these achievements reinforce that Temenos is best positioned to empower banks to outperform. Our industry-leading capabilities, global reach, and strong investments in growth demonstrate why we are confident in our right to win today and as the market continues to evolve.
The strength of our platform and products is shown by the deals we sign with top-tier banks globally. These banks are highly complex, spanning multiple geographies and business lines, and are very demanding clients. We have consistently proven we can win and expand in those clients. Some of those notable deals from 2025 include a U.S. Tier 1 bank for composable core in multiple international markets and a Japanese Tier 1 bank for core banking and payments in new geographies. As a result of our strong execution in the first 12 months of the plan, we are also raising our 2028 targets. I look forward to sharing more detail on the drivers and underlying assumptions behind the upgrade in the financial sections. First, let me share some progress made on the building blocks of our strategy in the last 12 months.
Starting with Lever A, extending market leadership in best of suite. We secured a significant number of new client wins with a particularly robust pipeline in the U.S. and Western Europe, capturing market share in highly competitive environments. We established a strategic beachhead in Brazil, closing a deal with a major public bank covering core, digital, and payments. This marks our entry into a new and exciting market with strong growth opportunities. Our high win rates against top front-to-back competitors continue to improve year-over-year, reflecting the strength and relevance of our platform. We also expanded our sales team and deepened our U.S. coverage. Many of our hires are bringing decades of highly relevant and domain-specific experience in the U.S. Lastly, we made ongoing improvements to our SaaS platform, which Barb will share more detail in her section.
What does success look like in 2026 for Lever A? Growing our market share in the U.S., as well as establishing and succeeding in new and fast-growing markets like Brazil, executing our product roadmap for the U.S. corporate and wealth segments, and advancing our embedded AI capabilities. Finally, we will continue to invest in our SaaS operations with a particular emphasis on reducing TCO for our SaaS clients, reinforcing our commitment to delivering long-term value. Looking at Lever B, enhancing composable core solutions. In 2025, and I'm particularly proud of this, we made significant headway in composable architecture, translating innovation into early commercial wins. We signed core banking deals with 14 Tier 1 and Tier 2 banks in Western Europe. This traction demonstrates growing demand for our composable architecture.
Here, too, our win rates against key neo vendors continued to increase year-over-year, underscoring the competitiveness of our composable offering. We made good progress on our roadmap, strengthening our right to win, and we established a dedicated Tier 1 and Tier 2 sales coverage model with strategic sales teams across regions focusing on the world's largest banks. Success in 2026 will be measured by the launch of additional composable solutions across both retail and corporate banking in the first half of 2026. We are also focused on the full launch of our thin ledger solution, which represents a key milestone in our composable journey. Finally, we aim to build lighthouse references, demonstrating real-world impact and setting the benchmark for future deployments. Thirdly, Lever C, accelerating adjacent point solutions.
In 2025, we advanced our point solutions portfolio with the launch of our FCM AI Agent and Temenos Money Movement, further differentiating our digital offering. We achieved double-digit year-on-year growth in the number of point solution deals, reflecting strong demand and our ability to address specific client needs. We established 10 co-design partnerships across different tiers, which drives collaboration with our clients. For example, our FCM AI Agent was co-designed with a Tier one European bank, which is now rolling out this product. Those close long-term partnerships with our customers ensure that our solutions are tightly aligned to customer needs. Importantly, we delivered over 100 digital go-lives in 2025, demonstrating our capacity to execute at scale and rapidly deliver customer value.
Looking to 2026, our priorities for Lever C include launching our new AI-powered digital solution in Q2 2026 to strengthen our innovation leadership. We are focused on building our U.S. pipeline and converting it into revenue, capitalizing on the strong momentum from 2025. Finally, we will continue to invest in implementation, governance, and AI to drive improvements in our delivery. Next, I would like to share an update on our four business enablers that allow us to execute consistently at scale and underpin our ability to deliver above-market growth. Firstly, on product and technology investment. I already talked about the structural changes in our R&D department. Our self-funded investments in product and technology have accelerated our speed of innovation and ensured we remain at the forefront of banking technology, as reflected in our high win rates.
In 2026, our focus is on further enhancing our architecture and composable solutions with embedded AI as an additional differentiator. On GTM investment. Beyond increasing sales headcount, we have implemented a robust regional and account coverage model and invested in sales enablement to drive sales productivity. This has significantly strengthened our market presence and ability to capture new opportunities. In 2026, we will build on this foundation by investing in our partner sales strategy, thus extending our sales impact in key growth geographies. Customer experience. We have strengthened governance with our implementation partners, and we are pleased to have seen the positive impact on go-lives. Our priority for 2026 is to enhance and optimize our source operations, ensuring that our clients benefit from even greater reliability, scalability, and value. Finally, on the operating model. We made significant progress in our operating model in 2025.
We developed a comprehensive corporate data strategy and rolled out our first internal AI agents, allowing us to make more data-driven decisions. In 2026, we will focus on standardizing and automating processes, systems, and data across the business and enable our employees with further rolling out of AI. Together, the four business enablers are critical to driving our momentum and delivering on our 2028 targets. Importantly, I want to spend some time on the progress we have made with our U.S. expansion. Firstly, on product and technology investment. In 2025, we opened our innovation hub in Orlando, designed for hands-on co-innovation with clients and partners. It's been a big success. We also delivered against our 2025 milestones for our U.S.-specific product roadmap, building on our localization efforts and unlocking the potential for future ARR growth.
This was supported by our hiring of more than 70 product developers and senior product hires. In 2026, we will continue to extend our U.S. product capabilities with further hiring to support this. Secondly, investment in GTM. Over the past year, we increased our U.S. sales headcount to more than 20 experienced hires, bringing in talent with deep local knowledge and relationships. This investment is already having a meaningful impact on our pipeline and key account visibility. Our priority for 2026 is to accelerate converting our U.S. pipeline, with more deals expected to sign this year, and we will invest in our GTM partnerships. Last but not least, customer experience. In 2025, we strengthened both our onshore and nearshore support for U.S. clients, ensuring they have access to timely, high-quality service and expertise. Client satisfaction has increased as a result.
In 2026, we will build out our U.S. strategic partner capacity, so we can continue delivering for our U.S. clients, working in collaboration with some of the leading technology companies in the U.S. and globally. Together, these actions position us to deliver on our U.S. growth ambitions and establish Temenos as a partner of choice in this critical market. Culture remains a fundamental focus for us. It is essential for the success of our strategy. In the last 12 months, we have worked to significantly increase accountability, alignment and collaboration, empowerment, and transparency, and together, drive performance higher. We have also strengthened leadership in the broader organization, elevating existing staff to expanded roles, and our values are embedded in how we operate every day. The initial results speak for themselves. Our Chief People Officer, Jayde, will share more granularity on what we are doing in the company.
Alongside our focus on culture, operating responsibly is fundamental for us. We are proud to be recognized for our leadership in ESG, achieving the top CSA score in the software industry and maintaining our MSCI Triple-A rating. Let me share our vision for Temenos in the AI era. It becomes interesting. AI is clearly reshaping technology markets, but banking is not a typical technology environment, and that distinction matters. Banks operate at the intersection of two of the highest thresholds in technology: product complexity and customer risk aversion. This is not an environment where generic AI solution can simply be dropped in. The requirements are fundamentally different, and that is where Temenos's moat is strongest. On the product side, banks demand trusted domain expertise that handle highly complex workflows, proprietary data, and platforms that can be extensively audited. These obligations do not shrink with AI.
As banks automate more, these obligations become more concentrated in critical systems. From a customer risk perspective, our solutions are mission-critical. Banks operate in one of the most highly regulated sectors and have zero tolerance for errors or hallucinations. Every decision must be deterministic. The cost of getting it wrong is existentially high. That's why we sit in the upper-right quadrant of this matrix, where both product complexity and customer risk aversion are highest, as is the threshold for AI adoption. In summary, Temenos provides a regulated backbone for banks globally, embedding AI into our platform, allowing them to automate, scale, and innovate without compromising on compliance, reliability, and auditability. We are not only protected from AI innovation from peers, incumbents, and customers, we are using it to our advantage. We are embedding AI throughout our core and delivery models.
In 2025, we received industry recognition for our level of AI differentiation in this era of noise. Let me now turn to one of our most important competitive advantages in the AI era: client trust. Trust is something you earn year after year by consistently delivering value. For Temenos, that trust is built on 4 pillars. First, mission-critical technology. We operate at the heart of highly regulated banks. Our cloud-native modern architecture serves as an auditable system of record, proven at scale. Clients rely on Temenos for security, resilience, and systemic stability, qualities that are non-negotiable in banking. Second, depth of functionality. We are a true front-to-back platform with deep coverage across all banking verticals. Our configurability and flexibility are market-leading, and we offer products that are built to meet specific regulatory contexts of specific countries and regions.
Our composable architecture, offering a menu of products that can be added depending on their needs, means that banks can adapt and grow with us. Third, trusted domain expertise. We bring decades of regulatory and operational knowledge embedded directly in our products. We have been operating in the banking sector for more than 30 years, giving us deep understanding of banking needs and low risk tolerance. We have a proven track record of delivering complex multi-year transformations, giving us very strong footnotes with existing customers. We provide industrial-grade governance to our customers to provide transparency for boards and regulators. Our proprietary banking knowledge graph is now enabling differentiated AI. Finally, an entrenched market position. Critically, we do not price on a per-seat basis, which is insulating us from workflow automation.
Our volume-based pricing model is linked to accounts and transactions, fully aligned with our customers' growth and success. In other words, as banks grow, including with AI, our platform processes more, not less. Many of our client relationships span decades. Switching costs are therefore significant. Core migrations are among the toughest projects in banking. Lastly, we have a track record across regions. Temenos sits at the point where AI must connect to real money and real regulation using a volume-based pricing model and bringing a banking knowledge graph that AI models desperately need. This combination gives us a significant right to win in the AI era. Let me explain why Temenos software is fundamentally important for banks' AI adoption. At the top of the banking tech stack, you have the experience and orchestration layer, the mobile and web interfaces, digital employees, BankAI platforms.
This is where AI can rapidly evolve, and already does, and enhance tools and interfaces. In the middle, you have the banking intelligence and execution layer. This is where Temenos operates. This is the critical layer that powers the core of banking. This is where the deterministic, auditable ledger sits, the single source of truth that banks, regulators, and customers rely on. It's where compliance, security, and risk controls are enforced, and where every transaction is locked, explainable, and governed. No matter how advanced AI becomes at the front end, it critically requires a robust, trusted, and compliant core. The third layer of the stack is infrastructure and generic AI, cloud compute, storage, and general AI models. This layer is likely to become commoditized, and it's where banks and vendors can swap providers with little differentiation.
In short, Temenos is not just resilient to AI disruption, we are indispensable to the safe, scalable adoption of AI in banking. Let me take you through our well-defined AI strategy and how we are capitalizing on our structural advantages. Our AI strategy is built around three pillars: product, process, and people. First, on product. We are embedding AI directly into our solutions to drive tangible value for our clients. This helps making banking operations more intuitive and efficient, lowering TCO while reducing risk in implementation and upgrades, making them quicker and more painless for our customers. Second, process. We are leveraging AI across our software development and GTM lifecycle to accelerate innovation. As Barb will speak to, we are integrating AI into our software development lifecycle.
We are also building AI agents for our customers, including the GenAI assistant within our core retail banking solution, empowering banks to design, launch, test, optimize financial products faster using GenAI. Third, people. We recognize that the benefits of AI are only realized when our people are empowered to use it. We have rolled out significant AI upskilling across the organization. Jayde will share more on people. In summary, Temenos has the unique combination of customer trust, deep domain expertise, and structural advantage to lead in the AI era. We are applying AI where it creates real value across our products, processes, and our people. This is how we are turning AI from noise to sustained leadership in banking technology. Let me close by being very clear about how we will measure our success in 2026. First, delivery of a product roadmap with embedded AI at the core.
This is key to maintaining our leadership position and continuing to bring differentiated value to our clients. Second, converting our US pipeline into revenue. The US remains a critical growth market, turning opportunity into results will be a clear measure of progress. Third, accelerating pipeline growth across all regions. We want to ensure we consistently capture demand and continue to expand our footprint globally. Fourth, increased AI enablement across functions. Embedding these capabilities deeper into our operations will empower our teams and drive innovation across the business. Finally, we are targeting strong ARR growth and achieving our 2026 guidance, which reinforces our confidence in the business and our commitment to delivering for our clients, our people, and our shareholders. These are the measures that will define our success in 2026 and keep us on track to deliver profitable above-market growth.
With that, let me hand over to Barb to talk about product and technology.
Thank you, Takis. Before we get started, let me address the glasses in the room. I'm not wearing them because of how cool product and technology is, but it is. Nope, I'm lapelled, too. If you guys can't hear me, please just wave at me. Unfortunately, I scratched my eye, so I'm dealing with a little bit of light sensitivity, but what you're gonna hear is pretty cool. Let's jump in. You know, it's great to be back with you guys today, my second CMD, I'm excited to update you on all the progress we've made across our key milestones, how we're positioning Temenos and our customers for success in both 2026 and beyond.
As you heard from Takis, at the last CMD, we shared our corporate strategy, and it's focused on 3 strategic growth levers. Over the past 18 months, we've organized our product and technology taxonomy against those levers. We defined dedicated strategies, we defined roadmaps, and we transformed the execution motion. This ensures our strategy directly drives where we invest, how we build, and how we go to market. First, our best of suite Lever A. This remains at our center. It's our foundation. It's spanning core banking, digital, and enterprise services. On the left side, if Adam goes back, you have our composable core modules. This gives our Tier One and our Tier Two customers flexibility and rapid deployment. On the right side, you see our point solutions. This expands our offering of independently deployable solutions.
The strength of this strategy is how it addresses our clients' modernization priorities. Lever A drives our largest and most strategic transformations. Lever B and C allow us to build credibility faster by enabling our clients to progressively modernize, either starting with their core or with point solutions. Together, this allows us to meet clients across multiple entry points and gives our sales team significantly more ways to win and compete. Now let's take a look back. I wanted to bring up the exact slide I showed you at the last CMD. I committed to executing on our strategies across all three strategic levers, and I'm proud to say we delivered.
On Lever A, we strengthened the suite across our segments, expanded our localization by launching more than 10 new licensable products, ranging from retail loyalty and savings tools to supply chain finance, and we delivered Copilots embedded directly in our core. We did not just enhance the platform, we expanded monetizable capabilities. On Lever B, we delivered on our promise to make core banking truly composable. Both retail and corporate core banking now have composable solutions available, and we are delivering these in Tier One and Tier Two banks across major markets, including the U.S. and Western Europe. In Lever C, we accelerated our point solutions and our digital capabilities. We launched solutions, including our FCM AI Agent, our Money Movement & Management, directly targeting priority client use cases and operational pain points.
The strategy is working, what's even more exciting to me is that the strategy is compounding. Let me give you an example. We recently secured a global Tier One win for our composable thin ledger. This is a high-performance ledger that helps banks unify fragmented legacy systems onto a modern stack. We're delivering this through our Design Partner Program, building together with our customer in 2026, this will allow us to bring it to GA in late 2026 and early 2027. While this is a Lever B deployment, the architectural improvements we're making flow directly back into Transact, strengthening the core for banks of all sizes. Another example, in 2025, we launched our Money Movement and Management. This is a Lever C solution. It integrates Treasury, FCM, Payments, and Core to solve high-priority client use cases.
It eliminates redundant integrations and materially reduces the infrastructure footprint, overall lowering the TCO for our customers. These adjacent capabilities do not sit outside of the suite. They fundamentally increase interoperability, they deepen our platform adoption, and they strengthen the overall Temenos platform. We didn't just deliver in 2025, we built a capability flywheel across our growth levers. What matters now is this is no longer about roadmap delivery, this is repeatable execution. Over the past year, we have pushed the entire CPTO organization to focus relentlessly on measurable results. To accomplish this, we made two fundamental shifts: First, we aligned our teams to be mission-driven through our agile transformation. Second, we aligned what we build directly to our customers' priorities through the launch of our Design Partner Program.
Starting on page 34, our agile execution transformation organized the product and tech teams into agile release trains. They're focused on delivering measurable client value. This structure also deepened our domain expertise within the teams, ensuring we have the right specialist embedded directly in the work they need to do. These teams now deliver quarterly, and in some cases, monthly, placing smaller increments of value into the hands of our clients sooner. It's been truly amazing to see how quickly the impact has been achieved when the teams are empowered to work this way. Adopting this model has led to 3 key improvements: We're innovating at a faster pace, we're reducing delivery risk, and we're enhancing predictability both for our clients and our investors. Moving to page 35. The second major shift has been aligning what we build by bringing our clients directly into the innovation process.
In May of 2025, we launched our Design Partner Program. This is something I'm personally deeply passionate about. This is where ideas become deployable products, not concepts. Through this program, we run 90-day delivery sprints directly with our clients that produce production-ready solutions at the end of each cycle. We start with our customers, and we understand the most important problems they're trying to solve. By co-innovating with our clients, grounding development in real operational pain points, workshopping together, and validating through immediate feedback, we ensure what we build achieves product market fit and accelerates real-world adoption. When your clients co-innovate, they become client zero immediately. There's a real pride for both us and the customer when we co-develop solutions together. In 2025, we already saw strong early results.
More than 10 clients and partners participated, and together, we co-developed and launched 3 commercially deployable solutions: our Copilot for Core, FCM AI Agent, and our Composable Core Modules. Looking ahead to 2026, we have a full roadmap. We have a very active co-innovation pipeline. It's across our AI digital, our composable subledger, AI agents for wealth, and expanding our copilot personas. The agile transformation gives us speed and discipline, and the Design Partner Program ensures that what we build reflects validated client demand. Together, they allow us to deliver measurable outcomes, not just outputs. This is how we turn innovation into predictable, repeatable success. Now let's talk about our core. Our approach is already delivering measurable results, and over the past year, we delivered more than 125 successful go-lives and upgrades, setting a new record for Temenos.
We run 600,000 test cases daily, and we have also integrated many of our client test cases into our test suite. By doing this, we simplify the testing and integration for our clients and create a better experience for our customers. To give you a feel for the complexity of a core transformation, we currently have a customer that's undergoing their core transformation. It includes over 100 integration points surrounding the core. Beyond record client launches and new products, we're focusing on improving that end-to-end experience, making the life easier for our clients every day. As a reminder, we have a single core, so every dollar we invest benefits all of our customers.
Looking ahead to 2026, we will maintain delivery discipline while continuing to expand how our clients consume our core, both by deepening our regional presence in markets such as the U.S. and targeting more focused use cases with our customers. In 2026, we will deliver corporate and commercial finance as a standalone offering, complementing both the best of suite and our composable components, already giving our clients clear modernization paths. This is how we convert core market leadership into sustained share growth, and core stability is what protects our ARR. Now let's turn to SaaS. We built strong operational momentum in 2025, improving our provisioning speed, automation, and our customer experience. 95% of environments were provisioned in under five days. That was down from 15 days previously. This is all enabled by our unified SaaS foundation platform.
We are now moving to best-in-class SaaS operations in 2026. Deployment automation increased fourfold, onboarding efficiency improved by 73%, accelerating go-lives. We support all of this with now a 24/7 local and nearshore model. In 2026, we will extend SaaS across additional hyperscalers and complete the coverage across our full product suite, including wealth, where it supports market expansion. SaaS is now operating at scale with measurable speed, efficiency, and predictability. This is what turns SaaS from transition into a structural advantage. Now let's move to page 37. Our leadership extends beyond our core, though. In wealth, we remain positioned as a leader, validated again by industry analysts in 2025, and we extended market share with go-lives with two of the world's top 30 private banks.
In payments, we validated production-level scale above 7 million payments per hour while maintaining instant latency, performance that's trusted across institutions from central banks to neobanks. This operational scale directly supports things like our Money Movement & Management, where we will continue to expand in 2026. In wealth, we are also expanding into the mass affluent segment, continuing to support our Tier One and Tier Two private banks as intergenerational wealth transfer continues to accelerate. We actually had a CTO from one of our Tier One clients, reach out, and he was so excited about the wealth products that we've delivered together, that he asked to come speak at our Tech Days next week to share with customers and partners the experience that he's had. Now let's go ahead to our U.S. strategy.
In 2025, very excited and proud to say we delivered across every major pillar of our U.S. roadmap. We advanced all 3 strategic levers. As a result, our U.S. product suite is now strongly positioned to compete aggressively in 2026. We are building on that momentum with the ambition for every major product to compete for market leadership by year-end. This progress was enabled by clear execution strategy, as well as combining dedicated regional investment, a U.S.-based product and engineering organization, and deep co-innovation with our clients. This is all built on a proven global delivery and engineering base. We built this U.S. team across all seniority levels and opened our innovation hub, which now houses more than 70 developers, many of the developers hired directly from the local universities.
This hub serves as the center of our co-innovation with our clients and our partners, and it's applying that same scale engineering and delivery model that we had already proven across our major centers in Chennai and Bangalore. With these foundations in place, our portfolio is well-positioned to compete strongly in the U.S. market in 2026 and beyond. Now let's turn to digital. Digital represents a little over 10% of our product suite, and it serves more than 600 customers. It remains a critical part of our best of suite and a key focus area within Lever C. Our digital platform is built on a proven foundation, including a unified API layer, core agnostic architecture, and extensive localization.
This allows us to support every type of bank, from Tier 1 headless deployments to fully integrated Tier 3 solutions, covering the full life cycle from onboarding and servicing to originations and collections. This capability translated into more than 100 digital go-lives in 2025. We are not building digital only for today. We are investing to move ahead of the market with multiple co-design partners across every region and across our banking tiers, helping shape what comes next. At this year's TCF, we will unveil our AI-powered digital solution, which connects directly into our broader AI strategy and is built with our customers. Speaking of our AI strategy, and I hope I'm not drinking Takis' water. This is an area I'm super excited about. Let me start with our product. Temenos sits at the core banking intelligence and execution layer.
This deterministic, auditable foundation is not replaceable. There's no room for hallucinations. It's the layer that AI ultimately depends on. This is our moat. This is where Temenos has a fundamental competitive advantage. This is where our single core matters. We have a significant install base on which we have built trust and deep domain knowledge. This is why our Design Partner Program is so critical to AI adoption by our clients. Our strategy is to embed AI directly into this layer through conversational interfaces and AI agents, strengthening the platform rather than replacing it. Conversational interfaces are transforming how users interact with the Temenos systems by enabling natural language interaction with the platform. This improves productivity, reduces operational friction, makes complex banking functionality accessible to a broader set of users.
We've already begun this with our Copilot for Core, where users engage directly with the system using natural language to accelerate their decision-making. AI agents increase operational capacity, reduce friction, and help banks scale efficiently while maintaining auditability and human oversight. One example is our FCM AI agent. We're a large Tier One client. We co-built that with them through our Design Partner, they're processing hundreds of thousands of sanction screening cases. They're automating more than 20% of their alerts, allowing their teams to focus on their higher complex work. In 2026, we will continue expanding our copilots, our agents, and our embedded AI capabilities across the platform. Turning to slide 42. Banks across the industry continue to face persistent operational challenges, including manual setup, custom integrations, reactive monitoring, operational outages, skipped upgrades, and all of those things slow innovation.
Our focus is not just embedding AI into the products, but deploying agents across the full life cycle of install, run, and upgrade. Let me give you an example of how we're using ourselves as client zero. Within our SaaS operations, we've implemented tooling in our AIOps, which is automating the triage of support tickets and incident management, along with root cause analysis and issue remediation. We had one incident that would have previously taken roughly an hour to diagnose. This was done in 8 seconds by the agent. The root cause analysis also previously would have been hours and days. The agent discovered a misconfiguration, and the agent also identified that by making the configuration change, it will save about $30,000 in hardware cost on an annual basis. This is the kind of operational step change AI enables.
In 2026, we will continue to apply this type of AI directly into our core operations to simplify installation, enable proactive management, and reduce downtime during upgrades. In digital, we are also enabling our customers to build and deploy experiences in days, built on the same explainable, auditable architecture. AI across core and digital fundamentally improves how our clients operate, upgrade, and scale on our platform. Now let's talk about the process pillar of the AI strategy. AI is also transforming how we operate internally. We're embedding AI across the full software development life cycle to increase throughput, improve our quality, and accelerate time to value, from build and testing through deployment and ongoing support.
In 2025, we started closest to our customer with the launch of t-Guru, our AI-driven implementation and support assistant. Today, more than 1,500 clients and partners actively use the tool. In 2026, we're going to extend the AI across the software development life cycle using three complementary approaches. We're applying GenAI coding to accelerate our development, we're deploying role-specific agents for requirements and test creation. We're advancing towards spec-driven development. By embedding AI into our processes, we are not only improving efficiencies, we are redefining how software is built and delivered. With that, let me close by saying, we set out and delivered what we intended to do in 2025. We have clear priorities for 2026.
We will measure success with the delivery of our 26 strategic roadmap across all of our core platform, the expansion of full SaaS availability across the product suite, including Wealth SaaS, strengthening of our competitive position in the United States, the launch of differentiated digital capabilities, and embedding AI across both product and development processes. We have clarity on our strategy, we have confidence in our platform. What matters now is disciplined execution delivered consistently at scale. With that, I will turn it over to my partner, Will.
Thank you, Barb. Okay, I'm gonna do without the glasses, if that's okay. Okay. Good afternoon. My name is William Moroney. I'm the Chief Revenue Officer here at Temenos, I look after the go-to-market teams, the customer-facing teams that range everywhere from field marketing to sales, customer success, and local support. It's a real pleasure to be here and to share how we've continued to evolve our go-to-market strategy and deepen our focus on customer success. Over the past year, I've worked closely with our sales, partner, and client teams to accelerate pipeline growth, sharpen our execution, and deliver tangible value for our customers. Today, I'll walk you through what progress we've made, highlight some key wins and milestones, and share how we're positioning Temenos and our customers for sustained success.
Over the past year, we've made strong progress on our go-to-market priorities to drive growth and scale. First, we expanded our sales capacity by more than 60%, hiring new individual quota carriers across our growth territories, and we've implemented strict account segmentation to ensure laser focus and accountability. On sales effectiveness, we've established best practices for pipeline qualification and deal management. We've revised sales compensation to drive linearity and ARR growth. We've invested heavily in enablement at sales tooling and our new sales leadership academy. We've also redesigned our pricing and packaging, making it simpler and more transparent for both our sales teams and for our clients, which has led to reduced friction in the sales process and brought us in line with industry standards.
Partners are fundamentally important here at Temenos, allowing us to scale from both a go-to-market point of view and also from a delivery point of view. On the partner side, we've launched a hybrid delivery model and enhanced partner engagement, certification, and governance, treating our partners as a true extension of our consultancy pool. I'll share more detail on our partner strategy in the coming slides. Looking ahead to FY 2026, our main priority is converting this expanded pipeline and our sales capacity into revenue, with a strong emphasis on execution and deal conversion. We will further invest in training, in enablement, and AI-driven sales productivity, while launching our new pricing and packaging to reduce friction and drive value with our clients. We're also deepening strategic partnerships and joint go-to-market initiatives to expand our reach, especially in those key growth markets. Turning to the US.
In FY 2025, we did make significant U.S.-focused product investments, building out our retail, corporate, and digital front-end roadmap to meet the local market needs. We expanded our U.S. sales capacity, increasing IQC headcount to over 20, and brought in experienced professionals with deep knowledge of the competitive community. Our partner network in the U.S. has grown, with new expertise recruited and our new Global Head of Partnerships, Edgardo Torres-Caballero, bringing extensive experience of building partner teams and networks in the U.S. specifically, and also globally, enabling us to engage more effectively with these strategic partners. We've also invested in onshore and nearshore support and SaaS operations to enhance client lifecycle experiences. As a result of these investments, we have seen strong growth in our U.S. ARR pipeline over the past year.
Looking ahead to FY 2026, our focus is on converting strong U.S. pipeline into revenue, establishing strategic partnerships and joint go-to-market plans, and expanding our U.S. hybrid partner delivery model and our implementation capacity in the U.S. Partners are fundamental to accelerating our growth because they enable us to deliver at scale. We have evolved our approach. Partner resources are now treated as true extensions of the Temenos team, held to the same quality, training, and certification standards. In FY 2025, we launched a hybrid implementation model to determine the right mix of Temenos and partner involvement for each project, factoring in bank size, transformation experience, deployment type, and existing client relationships. We have introduced a tiering system for our partners based on experience, capacity, and focused on enablement certification and robust governance, ensuring only certified partner resources work on our client projects.
Our approach empowers clients to see the quality of every individual working on their projects. We are also leveraging partner AI expertise to further de-risk and accelerate our implementations. Looking to FY 2026, we will ramp up partner implementation capacity in our key growth markets, launch AI use cases to lower the cost and the time, and further increase investment in Temenos governance to ensure oversight and delivery excellence. In 2025, we built significant sales capacity, and our focus now is on converting that into productivity. We've embedded best-in-class processes, methodologies, and tooling, layered with AI to drive greater efficiency, actionable insights, and predictability. This journey will continue in 2026 as we further leverage AI to empower our sales teams. We recruit top industry talent, and we are committed to keeping our teams at the leading edge.
We're investing heavily in enablement and in training, partnering with the best-in-class providers to stretch our team's capabilities and build confidence at every level. This year, for example, we kicked off with C-level training for our entire sales and sales leadership team to ensure a really fast start to 2026. Temenos' biggest assets are our customer base, our platform and product, and our sales distribution engine. Our rich product suite and composable solutions drive significant value for our customers and create ongoing upselling opportunities. Our sales force compensation is aligned with this, linking annual recurring revenue growth within our accounts and continuous value creation for our customers. Value selling is at the heart of our approach.
From the very first client engagement, we focus on demonstrating tangible value and building the business case for the transformation, helping clients realize efficiency gains, drive revenue, and most importantly, outperform their peers. This mindset is a key driver of our improved pipeline conversion. Finally, partners are critical to scaling our reach, from joint engagements with Tier One banks to partner-led smaller segments. With a new head of partnerships in place, expanding and deepening our partner ecosystem will be a major priority for 2026. Turning to AI. Do I have to sip water when I turn to AI? Turning to AI. Specifically, we've launched AI-powered sales tools that help our client-facing teams clearly articulate that value that Temenos brings to each and every client. These tools allow us to build value-based business cases tailored to individual clients, quantifying the benefits of our solutions.
We can now support TCO discussions with hard numbers. On average, we see that moving, for example, to our SaaS platform, delivers a 30% reduction in total cost of ownership compared to an on-premise, factoring in infrastructure, upgrades, and personnel. We can now show clients a clear route to payback, with typical project benefits exceeding costs within a tangible timeframe. The benefits end up being multiples of their investments. It's a collaborative process with clients and prospects, enabling us to engage more deeply and to act as a true partner in their digital transformation. Having just finished a very large value benchmark exercise with a Tier One bank in the United States, we are more than confident than ever that the impact of our AI-enabled value selling makes a difference.
The feedback from this Tier One U.S. bank has been that they have never seen this type of engagement from a core banking provider before, where the focus and the conversations were all about value creation metrics first, with progressive modernization as a means to deliver upon this. We are only able to do this because of deep domain expertise, the strength of our platform, and the trust our customers place in us. This is the moat that Takis was referring to earlier. Our commitment to delivering tangible value for customers is clear in these recent client successes across multiple regions that we operate in. For example, one of the largest banks in Central and Eastern Europe consolidated more than 5 systems and cut product development time in half as part of their core modernization journey.
In Western Europe, a major bank now has 550,000 active customers using its mobile banking app, with 95% of transactions flowing through their digital channels. In Vietnam, a leading private commercial bank migrated more than 18 million accounts in just one single weekend. They saw a 40% increase in payment transactions. We're also helping banks in Egypt, the Caribbean, achieve faster time to market, higher transaction volumes, and rapid client-based growth with full front-to-back transformation. To wrap up, I'd like to highlight the key measures of success that will define 2026 for our go-to-market and our customer success teams. Firstly, our top priority is converting the strong US pipeline we've built into revenue.
The U.S. remains at the center of our strategy, and we now need to see our focused sales capacity and targeted account strategy translate into deals with our target banks. We will also accelerate pipeline growth across regions, leveraging that expanded sales capacity, market segmentation, and laser focus on executing our three-year territory growth plans. Driving incremental pipeline through the partner channel will be a major focus of 2026. With new senior hires and a refreshed delivery model, we have clear plans to increase partner-driven contribution, starting as early as the second half of the year. Increasing sales productivity through tools and AI is critical. We've invested significantly in sales training, enablement, and AI-powered systems, and we're already seeing improved conversion rates. As we continue to leverage these investments, we expect productivity to keep rising. It's a really, really exciting time to be in sales in Temenos.
Delivering strong ARR growth. This is the ultimate goal, and everything we are doing, from sales execution to partner engagement, is geared towards that. I would like to hand back to Adam. Thank you.
Thanks very much. We are unbelievably, slightly ahead of time. We'll have a 20-minute coffee break. Be back at 35 past the hour. Thank you very much. I can get it in a second. Hi, everyone, welcome back. Before we get going again, just to remind you, Q&A at the end, and if you're joining via the webcast, you can submit your questions through the platform, and we'll pick them up live in the room. I'd like to welcome to the stage, Jayde Tipper, our Chief People Officer.
Thank you, Adam. Good afternoon. Thank you for coming back. Hope you've had caffeine and sugar in equal measure. As Adam said, I'm Jayde. I'm the Chief People Officer. I've been with Temenos since 2015, delighted to speak to you about our people and culture strategy. I'll start with what is at the heart of everything we do at Temenos, our people. People are the key, it's not a headline for us. It's a fundamental belief that enables long-term value creation. You've heard about our strategy, about our products, and about AI, all these are underpinned by our people having the right skills, being aligned and engaged. As we look to 2028 in our strategic plan, our people will clearly continue to be the driving force behind our clients' success.
We are investing in building a culture of performance, empowerment, and accountability, and responsibility to unlock the full value and potential of Temenos together. To highlight the values that define who we are. These values, as Taki said earlier, are embedded in daily behaviors, leadership expectations, and employee recognition. Our values are both clear and actionable. We challenge, we push the boundaries, ask the tough questions, and never settle for the status quo. We commit, we take ownership, and always deliver on our promises, and hold ourselves accountable to the highest standards. We collaborate, working as one team, leveraging diverse perspectives and strengths across teams and systems as one Temenos, so we achieve more together. We care. We support each other, invest in well-being, and aim always to make a positive impact on colleagues, clients, partners, and communities.
These values are reinforced through how we hire, promote, recognize, and reward our people, and our programs are highly valued by our teams and reinforce a culture that truly sets Temenos apart. To give one example is our Keys program. Pretty famous. They recognize loyalty and tenure. Milestones being at 10 years, five years, 10 years, some even 30 years now. I'm wearing my 10-year badge with pride. I've celebrated 10 years this year, along with 170 other employees. Myself and our employees, they wear these like a badge of honor. I noticed that Barb's not wearing a key. She's wearing the Orlando Innovation Hub.
I got a specific lapel. You'll see the others wearing Keys as well. Importantly, our values are the foundation of our culture. This is the very reason we continue to grow, innovate, and succeed together. Strong employee engagement and advocacy validate our people-first approach and support focused execution at scale. In our most recent voice, employee voice survey, representative feedback like, "This company motivates me to go above and beyond in my role," place us in the top quartile globally of companies for engagement, which is 7 percentage points above our industry benchmark. High engagement and a focus on lasting relationships, building meaningful career journeys, ensure talent continuity. This is a really critical advantage in a knowledge-intensive business like ours, where trust, expertise, and long delivery cycles really do matter.
Our Net Promoter Score for employee advocacy, this is the, "Would you recommend Temenos as a place to work?" Was up 6 percentage points in FY 2025, a strong sign of the progress we've already made on culture in the first year of our strategy. Lastly, we've received external recognition for our efforts and in Great Place to Work awards in 25 of our countries, including the US, which as you've heard already, is a key growth driver for our 28 strategy. Let me turn to leadership. Our people-first culture balances a nurturing environment with sustainable high performance. As Takis highlighted earlier, over the past year, we've strengthened 4 core pillars that really shape how we work. Accountability.
This is about taking clear ownership and delivering measurable outcomes, which include things like, as Will said, value-based selling to customers with ARR-based incentives, directly and indirectly. Empowerment. This is about pushing decisions closer to the work, trusting teams to lead, change, and innovate. We brought this to life through initiatives, like Barb said, about reorganizing our R&D function into agile release trains, which really empowers teams with clear focus and absolute clarity, which is so important. Alignment and collaboration are about breaking down silos, working across teams, and moving forward together with shared goals. To do this, we set objectives at the executive board level and adopt these across the organization, so there's a very clear framework all the way through of responsibility. Transparency is central to how we communicate openly, share information, build trust across Temenos and with our stakeholders.
These cultural pillars are embedded in our daily ways of working and drive our performance culture, which continues to benchmark above global standards. It's how we improve decision-making, ownership, outcomes, delivering lasting value for our clients and our people. I'll move to AI. I feel like I should drink, 'cause this was a trend that no one told me about, but I won't. I'll speak about the AI strategy that Takis laid out and that both Will and Barb also expanded on. AI is a defining force in our industry and for our workforce, and at Temenos, we are very clear: we see AI as an enabler and not as a threat. We're implementing strong governance, driving high adoption, and actively upskilling our people.
In 2025, we took tangible steps to put AI directly in the hands of our people, with a strong focus, as you would expect, on safe and responsible adoption. We launched our AI Champion Network in every function, which drives peer-led learning and brings out real-life practical use cases across the organization. 99% of our employees have completed AI training, supporting strong governance and trusted adoption. One example would be in our legal teams, where they're using AI to review documents and drive efficiencies in day-to-day work, and that came directly from the work done by our AI Champion Network, which is great to see. We've rolled out tools, as we've said, like Copilot, improving productivity and collaboration, with Copilot Studio planned for the first half of this year as well. We're building on the foundation in 2026.
We'll redesign work, workflow and roles, mostly to remove friction and unlock new value. Our career framework allows for transparency, putting future skills development in the hands of the employees so they can chart meaningful careers with us. Roles-based skills pathways will support our continuous upskilling. Really importantly, we will equip our managers to lead confidently in an AI-enabled environment, with a strong focus on trust, psychological safety, and positioning AI as a tool for better decision-making. Ultimately, these initiatives are designed to unlock AI as an enabler for Temenos, while retaining what matters most: governance, accountability, and human leadership. Because our technology only creates real value when it's trusted and adopted by our people. Let's look to 2026 further. Our priorities are clear and closely aligned to our strategy.
We will continue to strengthen our people-first culture, making sure our values are consistently lived across the organization. We're investing further in employee experience, building an environment where talented people want to come to us, stay with us, grow with us, and build long-term careers with us. Expanding our career development framework is a key focus, looking at workflows so our people can move faster, collaborate, and create the most impact. To accelerate all of this, clearly, we will deepen our AI enablement across the organization, equipping our people with the tools they need. Overall, our people and culture at Temenos are not a support function, but a strategic enabler of execution and our resilience. Our strategy succeeds because it is powered by a culture of accountability, empowerment, transparency, and collaboration. It is our people who turn that strategy into results.
Thank you. I'll now hand to Takis for financial framework and midterm targets.
Too many glasses here. Thanks to my team, Barb, Will, Jayde, for your insightful presentations. Let's now take a look at the financial framework and the midterm targets for 2028, building on the strategic context you've just heard and showing how our strategy translates into financial performance. I will share how our strong 2025 results enabled us to raise guidance for 2028, and we'll walk you through the building blocks behind our assumptions. Let me briefly refresh on our financial framework. This remains unchanged. We will continue to deliver above-market product revenue growth through our three established growth levers. Operational leverage remains a core strength. When we deliver top-line growth, margins expand strongly, as demonstrated in 2025. Going forward, ARR will drive free cash flow growth, and with improving cash conversion, free cash flow growth will outpace EBIT growth.
The strong correlation between ARR and free cash flow is central to our model, supporting predictable and accelerating cash generation. Our disciplined approach to capital allocation ensures we continue to prioritize long-term value creation and sustainable shareholder returns. Our subscription model, introduced in 2022, is now firmly established and continues to deliver strong results across all key metrics, driving the majority of our incremental ARR. In 2025, we saw ARR up 12%, EBIT up 21%, and free cash flow up 15% year-over-year, a clear evidence that our strategy is working. This transition has supported robust, high-quality growth and underpins our confidence in our midterm financial targets for 2028. As a result of our strong execution in 2025, we have raised our 2028 targets across all key metrics.
We now expect ARR to exceed $1.23 billion, EBIT to reach around $480 million, and free cash flow to reach around $410 million by 2028. These upgraded targets reflect a strong first year of execution, confidence in our strategic positioning, and good visibility. Despite the macroeconomic uncertainty of the last 12 months, market growth was resilient, and we expect it to continue at 7% to reach a serviceable addressable market of $30 billion by 2028. Importantly, Tier 3- Tier 5 banks continue to represent two-thirds of the market opportunity, driving both core and adjacent solution growth. The main drivers of incremental market growth are the ongoing shift from in-house to third-party solutions, and a change in deployment mix, with on-premise still dominant, but with an accelerating movement towards public cloud and SaaS.
Our strategy and product roadmap are tightly aligned to capture this expanding market, particularly as more banks look to modernize and outsource their technology stacks. As we have highlighted previously, Temenos has a significant and growing cloud business, with cloud revenue making up nearly 40% of ARR in 2025. Cloud ARR grew 15% in 2025, outpacing overall ARR growth and reflecting strong demand for our solutions on hyperscaler platforms. The market shift to public cloud and SaaS is accelerating, and we expect cloud ARR to reach around 50% of total ARR by 2028. This momentum positions Temenos to grow its footprint in a rapidly expanding market, with cloud becoming an increasingly important driver of our recurring revenue.
Moving on to the drivers of this growth, we now expect ARR to exceed $1.23 billion by 2028, underpinned by strong, broad-based momentum across all regions and client segments. Growth will be driven by our three levers: extending our market leadership in best of suite, enhancing our composable core solutions, and accelerating growth in adjacent point solutions. Lever A will contribute close to 50% of the ARR uplift by deepening our footprint with mid and lower-tier banks globally and capturing opportunities across retail, corporate, and wealth segments. Lever B is expected to add around 30% of the ARR uplift, building on the successful rollout of composable core modules and continued adoption by Tier one and Tier two banks globally. Lever C will deliver around 20% of the ARR uplift, reflecting strong demand for digital and adjacent solutions from banks across all tiers.
This balanced growth approach positions us to capture the expanding market opportunity and deliver sustainable, high-quality, recurring revenue. As shown on the left, we expect subscription and SaaS to drive around 60% of our ARR uplift by 2028. This growth is fundamentally changing our revenue mix. Subscription and SaaS are expected to increase from around 40% in 2025 to 45%-50% of ARR by 2028. Overall, this transition enhances the quality, predictability, and resilience of our revenues. Turning to our product revenue, this is set to grow to over $1.18 billion by 2028. The largest driver of growth is subscription and SaaS, contributing around 60% of this growth. Maintenance will continue to grow as subscription contracts are recognized both as upfront license revenue and as recurring maintenance stream.
This more than offsets the declining contribution from maintenance linked to term contracts. We expect ARR and product revenues to converge by the end of 2028. The conversion rate between ARR and product revenues is expected to improve from 91% in 2025 to approximately 105% by 2028, reflecting our continued shift to subscription and SaaS. After 2027, the impact of upfront revenue recognition for subscription licenses will no longer be visible, further enhancing the quality and consistency of our reported revenues. Now, let's focus on maintenance, where the strong growth in 2025 was largely driven by premium maintenance signings, with some benefit from value uplift from subscription and renewals, as well as small CPI benefit. Customers buying premium maintenance receive enhanced support with higher service levels, for example, with more responsive and dedicated support.
While there is still some runway for premium maintenance signings in our client base, we expect less than in prior years. Maintenance growth in 2026 is expected to be around 7%-8%, and by 2028, we expect maintenance growth to return to more normalized levels of around 6%. Our business model is built on delivering operating leverage, ensuring that as we grow, we continue to scale efficiently and maintain cost discipline. We plan incremental investments of $28 million-$35 million across all functions over the year in 2026, with a larger share allocated to R&D and sales and marketing to fully capture these opportunities. These investments are partially self-funded by approximately $10 million in cost efficiencies.
We are making these investments from a position of financial and operational strength, deliberately choosing to accelerate, while many in the industry are unable to invest at the same scale or pace. This is a pivotal moment to widen the gap to our competitors and extend our competitive advantage by investing decisively today. We are positioning Temenos to capture outsized opportunities as the market evolves, and for us to set the industry standard for years to come. Building on our disciplined investment and operating leverage, we expect to deliver strong EBIT growth and margin improvement through 2028. EBIT is forecast to grow to $480 million by 2028, with the EBIT margin expanding to around 36%. This uplift is primarily driven by robust product revenue growth, supported by further gains in services profitability.
As mentioned, to support our growth ambitions, we're making targeted cumulative investments of $110 million-$135 million through 2028, with the majority of this focus on R&D, while also managing ongoing wage inflation. These investments include extending our retail and corporate banking functionality, advancing our composable core, and strengthening our U.S.-specific roadmap, as well as investing in sales enablement, partner ecosystem, and automation. Importantly, these investments are partially offset by around $10 million in annualized operational efficiencies as we continue to automate processes and embed AI across the business. However, we are not, at this point, including any efficiency gains from AI in our model. We have a structured investment plan for our platform and product roadmap to ensure we remain at the forefront of innovation.
The significant majority of our investment is focused on enhancing our core banking platform with increased functionality across retail, corporate, wealth for all regions. We also have a strong focus on our U.S. product roadmap, as well as embedding AI across our platform, as Barb talked about. I would also flag composability, as this will be key to our success in Tier one and Tier two banks. Lastly, we will continue to invest in our SaaS platform and our wealth-focused solutions. Building on the strong EBIT growth and significant 300 basis point margin expansion in 2025, amplified by the full impact of our savings initiatives, we delivered a notable improvement in free cash flow conversion, increasing EBIT to free cash flow conversion to 69%, despite the considerable cash headwinds from restructuring efforts.
This demonstrates that our ability to convert profit into cash is not reliant on exceptional margin expansion, but reflects the underlying strength of our recurring volume-based model. Looking ahead, as the business continues to transition toward ARR and subscription, we expect free cash flow conversion to accelerate further, reaching approximately 85% by 2028. We anticipate generating around $410 million of free cash flow out of $480 million of EBIT, underscoring the quality, predictability, and cash generative power of our model. We have increased our 2028 free cash flow target from $400 million to $410 million, reflecting our confidence in execution and the momentum already achieved. The largest contributors to our target are strong product revenue growth and some additional uplift from SaaS and maintenance deferred revenue.
These gains are partially offset by planned OpEx growth as we continue to invest in R&D, GTM, and scaling of the business, along with smaller impacts from CapEx and tax. Despite absorbing significant headwinds in 2025, including elevated restructuring charges and BNPL client-related downsell, we not only delivered on our targets, but also have set the stage for accelerated free cash flow growth through 2028, with ARR growth as the primary driver. This continued shift toward recurring revenues underpins the quality and resilience of our financial model, supporting sustained improvements in cash generation and conversion going forward. Through consistent execution and disciplined financial management, we have steadily reduced our leverage to 1.2 times in 2025. Within our target range of 1.0-1.5 times net debt to EBITDA.
We reconfirm our commitment to maintaining this target range going forward. We continue to maintain a disciplined capital structure to support our investment-grade credit ratings of triple B- from S&P and triple B from Fitch, both with a stable outlook, giving us flexibility and resilience in our long-term financial strategy. We are reaffirming the disciplined capital allocation policy we set out our 2024 CMD. With significant free cash flow expected to be generated between 2026 and 2028, more than $1 billion, we have the capacity to fund growth, deliver shareholder returns, and retain financial flexibility. Our approach is built on four key priorities: organic investment, share buybacks, selective bolt-on acquisitions, and progressive dividends. We continue to prioritize organic investment, especially in R&D, to drive higher returns and long-term growth.
Share buybacks remain an important lever to ensure capital efficiency and enhance shareholder returns, and we maintain flexibility for selective bolt-on acquisition that support our strategic priorities and extend our market reach. We are committed to a progressive dividend policy, reflecting the stability and recurring nature of our business model. Let me summarize our new targets and measures of success in 2026. To recap, our focused execution and momentum have given us the confidence to upgrade our 2028 targets to the following: ARR above $1.23 billion, EBIT around $480 million, free cash flow of approximately $410 million. These goals reflect the strength of our strategy and our ongoing commitment to profitable market outperformance and value creation.
Success in 2026 will be focused on our product roadmap, including embedding AI, to continue to capture this opportunity, converting our growing US pipeline, accelerating pipeline growth across regions, building on our GTM expansion in 2025, increasing employee enablement by leveraging AI across all functions, and delivering strong ARR growth in our 2026 guidance. Thank you all for your time and engagement today. I'm excited about the progress we're making and look forward to keeping you updated as we deliver on these priorities in 2026. I have a high level of confidence together with my team to deliver on this, I will now hand over to Adam for a Q&A. Thank you.
Take a seat. Barb, Jayde, Will. In the hot seats. Just as a reminder for everyone joining via the webcast, you can submit questions through the platform, and there are two mics in the room, so if people have questions in the room. I'm gonna just warm them all up with one each from me, you know, just to, you know, set it to get things going. Takis, you just talked about the measures of success, the deliverables for FY 2026. You also referenced your excitement about the prospects for Temenos. I'd ask you, in your seat now as CEO, what are you most excited about that you think is gonna be most impactful for us in 2026 and beyond?
I think, Adam, it's both excitement, but also a high level of confidence. It's really the structural demand drivers, you know, have not changed. If anything, they have become even more prevalent. Now, I have a strong team in place, and we have a strong, you know, culture in place, so this is a strong foundation for, you know, the focus areas for 2026. This is across product, where we want to deliver, you know, our roadmap, specifically also for the U.S. It's on the go-to-market side, you know, converting, as Will said, you know, our pipeline, which is very strong, into revenues. Overall, we also want to embed AI, not just in our products, but across the organization. I think this is essential for the success. Finally, I'm also excited to, you know, to drive our people-first culture to the next stage.
Great. Thank you. Just following on the AI theme, Jayde, you talked about AI enablement for employees. Could you just dive in a little bit more detail on what's gonna happen in 2026, what we should expect?
As you would imagine, there's a huge thirst for AI learning enablement across all teams in the company, which is great to see. Evidenced by the fact that 99% of them took AI learning courses this year, which was. We're really pleased about. 2026 is really building on what we've done already in 2025. Some really practical things would be, firstly, looking at roles and workflows, how we reduce friction, looking at skills and upskilling pathways for specific roles and functions. I think really importantly, building programs to enable managers to lead their teams and people in this new AI world.
Great, thank you. Barb, you talked about your agile release trains and co-development.
Yes.
Can you talk about the impact of those and what we expect to gain from those in 2026?
Yeah, look, I've been doing this a long time, and when you typically undertake an agile transformation, you have an expected time to start to see the value. What I will say and I know why this happened, we have accelerated our transformation far beyond my expectations. We are well ahead of where I would have expected us to be. When I take a step back and look at that, it's because of the deep domain expertise that we have within the teams. Now, by focusing them within the trains, we're actually deepening that domain expertise because, as an example, we would take the payments team, and now they sit within multiple arts. Now they're training more people in the expertise that they had.
I think we're gonna continue to see just a level of depth that is going to be critical. W e talked about the importance of that deep domain expertise, so I think we'll continue to see that grow. On the Design Partner Program, man, we have a full slate already lined up for 2026, and we have more customers asking: "How do I be a part of this?" What we wanna do is make sure that we roll it out in a way that we can spend the time with customers and get to the right solutions. I think we'll continue to see growth in that space for sure.
Great. Finally, Will, for you've obviously invested very heavily in QuotaCarrier headcount in 2025. I think we talked quite a lot about the partner strategy for 2026. Can you give a bit more flavor on that across the different types of partners and what we should expect to see in the coming year?
Yeah. I think, if you look at any technology company ever in their history, the real scale comes through partners. The real scale comes from not just the company themselves. Think of all the big names, it's their partners that have grown them to the massive sizes they that they currently are. Our partners do fundamentally two things for us. Firstly, they're key to our delivery. For every consultant we have in-house, there are 10 consultants out there in our partner network, and that's really, really critical. We'll look to continue to grow that with high quality, because in our growth markets where we're seeing the opportunity, we are gonna need that capacity.
When we switch into the second thing they do for us, which is effectively either direct selling with us or many different parts of the sales process. It may be that a consultative partner, think of the Big Four, is sitting in front of the chairperson of a bank talking about transformation. The next thing they start talking about is vendors you should work with. One of the things that we've seen happen this year is, number one, we have gone out in the market and put a lot of effort into engaging with these sorts of partners to make sure that we are across all the areas of where opportunities can come in from.
One other thing we've seen, and it goes to what Takis was saying earlier, is that the core seems to have become much more important at this juncture of what's going on across the technology stack of these banks. We're seeing a lot more partners come to us proactively because they can see that the core is a protected moat, and it's something they need to work with in order to be able to add value for their banking customers as well. Partners, yes, really important, becoming even more important, and that's why we need to spend even more time with them in 2026.
Great. We'll now open up to questions, if you can just introduce yourself as well. Michael, would you like to go first?
Sure. Thank you, Michael Vontobel. I have 2 questions, one for Jayde, and one for Takis. Temenos has been through quite a lot of changes, management changes in the last 3 years, and I was wondering if how employee churn or turnover has actually evolved over the last, over the last 6 months, if you have any numbers on that?
We don't disclose absolute attrition numbers. I can tell you that we've historically had very lower than industry turnover, so we're comfortable that we're within the industry benchmarks for most countries. What I will say, though, Michael, is that we track very, very carefully attrition amongst our top talent and critical roles because we've heard so much about domain expertise, and we're low single digit on that, on that, so we're quite comfortable with our ability to retain the talent where it really has the most impact.
Okay, thank you. One for Takis. On the 2028 targets and the uplift or the change in the targets, I understand that they are organic, but still, since they were first set, FX has made quite big moves, and FX was a tailwind, I think, for you in 2025. My question is, how much of the uplift in targets is related to FX? Because you haven't mentioned anything on that in the presentation.
It's correct that there was, you know, some impact from FX in 2025, but we always guide and also report it in USD, basically functional currency. Number one, there is still organic as a base, so no M&A included in those targets, and the uplift is not related to the FX impact, especially not on ARR. It's really related to the mapping we have done across our clients, and we have now three-year plans or three-year strategies. You see the corporate strategy, but there is a three-year strategy for everything: sales, product, people, corporate function. You know, there is a three-year IT security risk strategy.
It's driven by, you know, visibility, it's driven by pipeline growth we have seen with new headcounts coming in. That's on the ARR side. Clearly, if you improve ARR, that has also an impact on free cash flow. On EBIT, clearly, we have seen a strong start, basically some of that upside from 25, we let flow into the 2028 targets.
Fred, would you like to go?
Thank you. Frederic Boulan at Bank of America. Maybe one question for Takis and one for Barb and Will. Firstly, on the I mean, we'd be keen to hear your thoughts in terms of cost-moving parts next year. We've had a very meaningful margin expansion in 2025. When I look at your presentation, you talk about enabling employees with AI, et cetera, but at the same time, you see a lot of investments, the Orlando Tech Hub, et cetera. Can you clarify a little bit what we should expect in the short term? I mean, you've given us a 28 number, but are you focusing primarily on the kind of market opportunity, investing, et cetera, and then operating leverage will follow?
you know, keen to hear where you stand on that, and then I've got a question for you guys as well.
Yes, Fred Blanc, if you remember, we started the year with an outlook for flat to down margin. We ended up 310 basis points over 2 years. It's still more than 150 basis points, so that's actually more. W e used to say 100-150 basis points per year, so we're tracking quite well ahead. We also slightly increased the 2028 margin. For us, it's an opportunity, and I mentioned extending and expanding basically the competitive advantage. This strong margin profile we've seen as an opportunity to accelerate R&D investments. The demand is there, we see clients really flocking to us almost. That's a big opportunity. I think the basis for 2026 was a balanced approach.
There is still quite some investment to be done. Let's say flat to slightly up margin, I think is reasonable at that time. Keep in mind, we always start the year on a conservative note. I think this is the right mix to enable the investments. A lso in 2025, we ultimately invested the cost base, ended up where it was. We did execute on the investments, we did execute on savings, and as a company, if you're honest, and if you really want, you can always drive additional efficiencies and savings. Let's say, the $28 million-$35 million we invest, largely in product, we also have still some, you know, $10 million or so efficiencies to be won.
Thank you. Second question on win rates versus competition? Very impressive metrics. Do you see some of your competitors starting to wake up to that, react in terms of product or go-to-market standpoint, to try to regain momentum against you? M ore so go-to-market and product question.
Yeah, I think I'll take the competitive side first. It's an interesting landscape, isn't it? You know, I've been with Temenos six years now, and I remember when I joined the buzz was the neo vendors, and this was where the fear was coming from in vendors like ourselves. We're actually not seeing those vendors in the competitive landscape at all anymore. I think there's been a massive shift away from them. It's then it's a shift back to the more traditional vendors. And obviously, the landscape is different in different geographies. Internationally, we probably have two or three key vendors who, to be honest with you, I respect their technology platforms, we still believe we're far ahead.
If we switch to the U.S., which is our growth market, you're still seeing the traditional vendors there. The difference between those competitors and the ones we see internationally is that they haven't, they just haven't had that opportunity to invest in the technology platforms. There's reasons for that, because they're trying to maintain many platforms, and I get that completely. I think that if we look globally, that's why I want to kind of segment these into two. If we look globally, the competitive landscape among, let's say, the two or three vendors that follow us on the IBS table, so when you see us at the top, there's a few vendors that are further down.
They've always been, you know, they've always been targeting Temenos because they're always gonna target the leader. In the U.S., we definitely got a head start in early 2025, where the incumbent vendors were not really thinking about Temenos. We're getting feedback now that definitely there is a huge awakening that Temenos has entered the market, and we're seeing this within a number of the pursuits as well, that there's a fight back happening there. You know, competition is competition. We've got to be able to go forward and win based on value. Yeah, in summary, not much has changed globally. Definitely from a year ago, the American vendors, the U.S. vendors, have woken up and seen that there's a threat now, and they're working to react to that threat.
Toby?
Thanks. Hi, it's Toby Ogg from JPMorgan. Well, just on the U.S. pipeline you've been building in 2025 and early 2026, I know the plan is to start converting that into revenue through 2026. Could you give us a sense for, you know, what sort of conversion rates you've seen already on any of that incremental US pipeline that you've been building? How does that conversion look relative to sort of what you would typically see across the rest of the business? Just for Takis, you mentioned that you aren't embedding any efficiency gains from AI in the model. Can you give us a sense for how big those gains could be?
You know, where you think, within the organization, the biggest efficiency gains could be, and would that show up in terms of incremental, headcount reduction? Thank you.
Okay, I'll go first. I think if you think about Our plan for the U.S. and our go-to-market strategy for the U.S. was there's 3 years now we've been at this, or there's 3, let's say, calendar years we've been at this. Late 2024 was about getting the sales team in place. There was huge activity in 2024 to get, you know, quite a lot of salespeople in through the door. Our target was to get them all in by the, I think, the 10th of January, we had them in by so they could go to the Temenos kickoff, which was really important for us. 2025 has been in the first part about setting the strategy in the first couple of quarters and then starting to build a pipeline.
That's gone, I think, really, really well. We've been extremely happy with the pipeline that has been built. We've been extremely happy with the type of pipeline that has been built as well. As we move now into 2026, we continue to generate that pipeline. We're quite focused. If you remember, there's a set number of Tier One, Two, and Three banks that we are focused on in the U.S., we proactively build, and we reactively build out of that set population of banks. Now in 2026, we're going to see conversion. It's hard at this juncture to look at our global conversion metrics and ratios that we use and apply them to the U.S. We'll have a lot more data on that when we come out of 2026.
We use different metrics like the pipeline coverage and conversion ratio from going into the year, in quarter, things like this. It's a little bit too early, but definitely by the end of this year, we'll be able to assess how that compares to global.
Given, you know, from a financial perspective, you know, how we have modeled this is you assume lower conversion rates than in all other markets. We talk here about new logos. You know, the first time, even if you're selected, you need to go through procurement, you know, the legal process. Again, being prudent, given this is, you know, new to us and very central to the strategy. On AI, our ambition is, and given we have been rolling this out now for a few quarters, actually to drive adoption. As Jayde has said, you know, people will only adopt if they feel safe. Yeah. If developers think, "Okay, if I'm going to use whatever tool, I'm going to make myself redundant," you don't get adoption. Our AI ambition, and that has been clearly communicated internally, is...
You know, if you look at the efficiency formula, it's actually doing more with the same resources. It's not about headcount cutting. It is increase throughput, you know, be faster, these things. Some years down the road, you know, you can always think about, okay, where is efficiency going to come first? I believe, you know, there is such a massive opportunity to accelerate the product roadmap and evolution. If I can, you know, put more AI tooling into Barb's organization and increase, you know, the delivery or accelerate the delivery by six months, you know, he can sell a lot more. Yeah. The cost saving is really not that relevant in that context. Across the rest of the organization, again, it's about adoption, from marketing, finance, legal, HR, across there. Again, we don't drive.
We want actually better processes, higher throughput, and then we'll look at, you know, potential AI efficiency gains.
Mark?
Hi, it's Mark Hyatt from Morgan Stanley. Thanks for taking the question. Thanks very much for the insightful presentations. Firstly, I'd just like to ask a question to you, Barb. Maybe going back to basics, you know, my understanding is that the U.S. market is a pretty complex market in terms of product demand from customers. You've talked about your ambition to be the number one in that market. Can you talk to me about kind of the state of the portfolio today, where you see the gaps, where are your key priorities in terms of R&D investment? Then maybe a second one for you, Takis, on the U.S. market and the investment ahead.
You've given a pretty clear breakdown in terms of how much the US is in terms of R&D spend, but obviously, there's a lot of operating leverage in the business. What makes you comfortable that that's the appropriate level to be investing in? Why isn't that, you know, going more given the fact that the market is so large?
Okay. If I look at our product offering and kind of back to the slide, we are competitive across our U.S. landscape, and part of that's driven by because we have such a vast range of clients across the entire globe, it was really about the localization efforts. Now, the U.S. banking, I know it very well, right? It is about that localization efforts, and that's where we spend a lot of the time. What we're looking to do now is differentiate ourselves and get to market leading across our products, and that's our goal for 2026. But confident that we'll be able to do it. When I look at both where we're at now, but also understanding the products that we're competing against, I feel very confident in our ability to go win.
On U.S. investment, keep in mind we're talking here about people. There is, you know, there is a lot of effort to hire the best people, you know, if we talk about on the product side. On sales, we have already done it. I think on the sales front, it's the appropriate investment for our target market. You know, we're not going below the top 160 banks. If we see, you know, even more traction, you know, Will is free to invest. You know, he can easily get another 5 or 10 salespeople. If we look at the product side, again, there is not really a restriction on hiring in Orlando. Yeah, it's getting the right quality. I think we have a strong team in place, and now it's about also productivity and, you know, getting the product out.
For the opportunity we see and for the roadmap, you know, we have for the next few years, it's the appropriate investment. Adding even more people faster will probably dilute the impact. You know, from today's perspective, this is appropriate. If we see more opportunity, more traction, we can easily, you know, accelerate that. What's embedded in our 2028 targets, it's $110 million-$135 million. We don't have a plan to spend all that money today. Clearly, there is a plan for 2026 and beyond, clearly, there is enough opportunity, there is enough capacity available to invest.
Justin, would you like to go?
Thank you very much, and thanks for the presentation today. This is Justin Forsythe from UBS speaking. A couple of questions. I think I'll hit all three of you actually. Jayde, sorry, I'll leave you out. You've gotten plenty of questions already. An AI question, first for Takis. Have I correctly understood the guidance framework in suggesting that you're assuming limited or embedding limited disruption from AI in the top line, ARR, et cetera, guidance? Barb, just to follow on about the AI point, I totally appreciate the point around deterministic as a key driver of the value and regulation, and there are a lot of things you went over on the slide. If we maybe agree for a second that, okay, AI isn't the biggest risk, how do you think about distributed ledger technology?
Because it would seem to me that that provides a lot of interesting angles for modernization and less R&D dollars to build a core banking technology. Lastly, Will, I wanted to hit you on the U.S. It seems like, again, per the levers, that it remains a key part of the growth algo. Can you just talk a little bit about what percentage of the pipeline is tied to the U.S.? If I'm drawing lines, and maybe I shouldn't do this, on the ARR chart that you put up, I mean, it looks like not quite 100% growth in pipeline there, but somewhere in the region, maybe of 75%, or is that just simply not to scale?
Uh, not-
Thank you.
Easy answer, not to scale, illustrative purposes.
Okay.
Yeah.
Maybe you could then talk in directional nature about the actual increase in the pipeline. Thank you.
Okay. First on the 2026, but also the 2028 guidance, the element of AI disruption included. I think we always take a prudent approach, not just for the current year, but even more for the multi-year, for, you know, all sorts of risks which are not quantifiable today. We currently, if you were to ask me what's the biggest risk, you know, to this, whether it's 2026 or 2028, it's really more macro uncertainty, massive external shocks. Not a recession or, you know, normal GDP evolution of individual countries. It's really, you know, something like COVID or another GFC. These things probably would have a much higher impact than specifically an AI disruption risk. Prudent, you know, as always, at the start of the year, no specific AI disruption, negative impact factored in.
Unified ledger. You know, as we spoke earlier, you know, this really is about unlocking innovation for our customers. When I think about, you know, the problems that our customers are trying to solve, how we come forward to help them get there is a lot of legacy fragmentation in the back end, for our customers that slows them down. I think where some of the question was going around, you know, the unlock of that, to me, you know, when we, when we help our customers unlock their ability to innovate, when we help them, you know, be able to take advantage, it just drives more opportunity for us to do co-innovation around the problems that they're trying to solve.
Very excited for the Tier One bank that we're doing the co-design on, and we'll continue to do that type of things.
So on the U.S. pipeline, obviously, the ARR segments, I can't comment on, break it out. And I'm gonna try and help answer the question, knowing that I can't divulge, you know, the splits. The U.S. pipeline growth has obviously accelerated faster than any other region we have. And that's for two reasons, I think, because obviously the baseline was a bit lower, but also when you inject that many sellers into a region, especially, we brought a lot of sellers in that had experience in the competitive space, so they came with their Rolodexes, they came with their relationships with banks in the U.S. Because we were quite targeted, that has accelerated faster than any pipeline that I've seen, actually, ever.
What I'm also gonna try and help out a little bit with is the nature of that pipeline has been interesting as well. Whereas in a lot of our key growth markets, we go in and we're building pipeline for a full core replacement, which, you know, is a fairly long sales cycle. I think last year I mentioned sales cycles with us go sometimes 18-36 months. The interesting dynamic with the U.S. is that we've seen our pipeline have smaller components of that, and there's a lot more of the progressive modernization, i.e., composable requirement coming from the U.S. banks. That's interesting because obviously it should show to a shorter, a shorter sales cycle, also a shorter project and a release of value back to the bank faster.
That's been quite a learning for us, I think, in the 12 months, that we probably didn't expect such a high percentage proportion of the pipeline to be composable requirements, i.e., you know, there's quite a lot going on in corporate deposits right now. It's like, you know, we'll work with the incumbent, but we'll bring in the new technology for corporate deposits. Payments is another big area. Now, that's interesting because for me, core banking is hard. When you go in and you do a component, it's marginally easier to release value quicker.
If you can do that well, you go into your land and expand type strategy, where you're in beside an older incumbent, you're proving your value, and then you move over onto the next thing after that project. That's actually how we built our relationship out with Commerce, where we started in an area, and then we went across other areas. Regions, which is obviously a very important customer of ours, is just retail deposits, $9 million of them. This model, we have experience with it in the U.S. That was quite interesting. The final thing I'll say on the pipeline, because I want to give you something, not being able to do the breakdown, is a very high % of the pipeline is actually SaaS.
This was another, kind of surprise for us, I guess, or, like I mean, almost 90% is SaaS right now. It's a hunger for SaaS solutions around core banking and composable in the US at the moment.
Thank you so much.
Charlie?
Yeah. Hi, it's Charles Brennan here from Jefferies. Just a quick question on product and then one on sales as well. We've heard quite a lot about the innovation hub and co-innovation. What does that actually mean? Is that customer-specific development, or are people happy just to add their requirements to the to-do list of platform R&D? In the past, we've seen Temenos making some product commitments that you've perhaps struggled to deliver on. Why is it different now? Then just on the sales side, it seems like you're relying more on partners. If I think across the rest of the sector, I've lost count of the number of times I've seen partner disappointment being used as an excuse for broad-based underperformance.
Can you just give us a sense of what proportion of your budget you think will come from partners this year relative to last year? Thank you.
Yeah. Charlie, what I would say is this Design Partner Program is completely different than gathering requirements. What we do is we go to the customers, we look at what are the problems that they're trying to solve, not what are the requirements that you want us to do. We take a holistic approach. It's actually really cool to see in the room. We'll have the customers, sometimes partners are joining us as well. We'll use partners in the Design Partner Program as well, bringing people from operations, from their engineering teams, from legal, from compliance, from risk, making sure that there's a holistic understanding. We also typically don't handle the Design Partner Program with one client.
When you think about digital, I spoke to it earlier, we actually have a design partner in every single region and at different tiers of banks, so that when we create the product, we're actually creating a holistic product for the industry, not an individual product for the customers. That is our always our gate is to make sure that we're creating a product that will solve industry problems, not a client-specific problem. If it's a client-specific problem, we will guide them back to, you know, if they want to leverage our tools to build something for themselves specifically.
We're looking at solving industry problems, I think, you know, to touch on the earlier, the question about before, that's a big reason why we launched this Design Partner Program, so that we're only announcing products when one of three things is true. We said this last year, as well, we're sticking hard to it. Either, A, it's in design partner, actively we're in a co-design with customers, it's ready for GA or will be ready for GA within six months. If one of those three things is not true, we will not talk about a product publicly.
Just to link the sales side of that, Charlie, which is really important. One of our most exciting products is the Temenos Payment Hub, because when we bring that into a bank and we show the power of that, especially within corporate payments, it really does blow them away. Not a lot of people realize we actually co-designed that with a Tier 1 European bank in the Netherlands quite a few years ago. And we still look back on that and see that the power of the solution was because we sat for months and months in rooms with a Tier 1 bank on their vision and their dream of what a product should look like that would come from a vendor.
We still see that, and we still see that product very powerful within Temenos. What Barb and her team are doing is they're formalizing that within product, which is really, really exciting for us. Like, the unified ledger is an example of that. You know, that's not gonna be client-specific. We're working with what we believe one of the leading banks in the world to co-design that, so that when we do bring it into GA, that we're it's not something we've created ourselves, we've created with a bank. On into the question on partners, I think maybe there's a bit of a misunderstanding here. We're definitely not in the box-shifting partner channel game. You know, that's not us, like the American.
some of the very big American firms that are there, that are more high volume. Our partners, when it comes to sales, it's either sell to, through, or with, okay? I'll explain those very quickly. Selling with means that we are alongside a partner. Now, that could be somebody who's a local partner in an emerging market country, who understands the culture of the bank, has worked with the bank, maybe they've put in the ATMs at the bank, the bank is comfortable with them, and we're selling alongside them. That's what I mean when I say sell with a partner. Selling to a partner means that we're actually selling to a partner who's gonna create a managed service and bring that into the market. We are seeing...
On the sell with, there's no change there. We see that, what we're trying to do there is we're trying to move up the line, and I mentioned the top four consulting firms, so we're engaging a lot more with them. When they talk about the progressive modernization story with their banks, they come down and say, "And Temenos is a partner of ours that I think you should talk to." That's sell with.
We are seeing an increase in that. It's probably, you know, like a 10% increase year-on-year, where there are more system integration partners who are coming to Temenos and saying, "Well, we'll take your platform, then we'll build things around it, and we'll sit things on top of it." They're going to then provide that to their customer as a managed service offering or maybe even as a BPO offering, so it's a full outsourcing model to their customer. They're service providers, they're very well-positioned to do this. If we take a market like Saudi Arabia, quite a bit of our sales in 2025 were in this managed service model because there isn't a SaaS model available in SA, but these partners have created that.
That I think maybe 10% growth. Then there's sell-through. Sell-through is where we actually have a value-added reseller model. It's a very small component of what we do. Again, I think flat to maybe 5% or 10% growth on that. The most important thing for me in energizing the partner network in 2026 is the influence of partners. The partner influence is key for us because banks, especially large banks, they work with tens and hundreds of software and service providers and with 5- 10 different advisors and consultants. It's critical for us as we engage with that partner network, that there are positive words coming, that there are leads coming in, that there's co-conversations happening about how we bring that value back to our banks.
Then the final thing on partners is, the conversations we're having with our partners now from a go-to-market perspective are all about: How can we help you deliver value for your banks? We're confident if we can inject ourselves into that conversation, then we're gonna get more pull in from our partners. Josh.
Hi, good afternoon. Josh Levin from Autonomous Research. Two questions: One, banks have historically been reluctant to overhaul their cores, excuse me, because of the operational risk associated with implementation. Does agentic AI change that? Does it make implementation easier and make banks more likely to overhaul the core? To flip the question, one of the reasons banks have sort of had an impetus to upgrade the core is because they're running out of COBOL programmers as they retire, but now you don't need COBOL programmers because you have agents to go ahead and reprogram. Are banks also thinking about perhaps extending the life of their legacy cores because of agentic AI? Thank you.
Do you want to go first? Well, I'll take the first part, I guess, and you can talk about the COBOL side of it. Yeah. This is the biggest conversation within Temenos right now because if you look at a lot of our history and where our business was built, the tier five, four, and three banks, you know, they're a lot more dynamic. They don't have that technical debt, as much of it anyway. It's not as complex. You look at any tier one bank globally right now, they've probably got an IT budget of between $10 billion and $15 billion. They're spending 80% of that just to keep lights on. There's not a lot of innovation happening in there. As you say, contemplating a core replace or even contemplating a departmental replace is...
It brings risk, and it brings cost. The biggest barrier to that and to the making that decision, which is underlying that risk and cost, is understanding the legacy that they have, understanding the data structures, understanding the business processes within it. Because just the simple requirements gathering to figure out what they've got and how they, you know, take these six core, old core systems stacked on top of each other, migrate them into Temenos, the biggest effort there is actually understanding what they have for a tier one bank. It is early days, but in our, in our delivery teams and with our partners, what we're hoping for is that artificial intelligence will help this piece. Now, how much it helps and how quickly it helps is the million, five billion dollar question, I guess, right?
Definitely we've seen early green shoots of this making big changes. That's done a second thing, and that is that we now can see a little bit more proactive engagement from the Tier One banks with us because they can see that maybe there's something there now that can start to move them off this 30 or 40-year-old set of solutions. From our point of view, from the go-to-market and from the delivery point of view, yeah, we're super excited. We're conscious that there's a journey here, and we're just not sure how quick and how complex that journey is gonna be. I think on the COBOL side, I'll hand it over to the expert.
Look, you know, when we talk about run, install, upgrade, you know, we consider ourselves client zero with our SaaS. We are gonna continue to leverage AI to improve the upgrade processes, the install, run, you know, operate. I think that there's real opportunities in that space, right. But when I think about, you know, COBOL, I just have to smile because COBOL's been dying since before I graduated. The thing that I think, you know, Tuck has talked about it, Simon has, I touched on it as well, you have to have that domain expertise. AI has to have context in order for it to be able to do anything.
When you think about why we feel so confident in our position and why we actually see AI as an advantage for us, it is that deep expertise. It's being able to explain down to every single decision that you make, what the AI has done. You know, because we have that 30 years of depth and expertise, that's why we feel very comfortable and strong in our position that AI is actually an advantage for us.
I'm gonna take one question actually online from the webcast.
Mm-hmm.
I think, Will, this is probably more towards you. In terms of the U.S. banking market and recent increase in bank M&A, does that increase the possibility to gain share or delay it? Are U.S. banks truly looking to rip and replace existing legacy cores with Temenos? If so, what are the primary drivers for that?
I think the M&A question first, we are seeing an uptick in M&A activity in the U.S. We've also seen deregulation as well, obviously, which is driving another direction in banking in the U.S. I think that it depends on the bank. If we look at where we've seen deep M&A activity outside of the U.S., 'cause you look at some core markets where we work in, it's not like the first time we've seen M&A. Normally, what happens in M&A is that the first step is to consolidate onto a core, right? We haven't really ever seen that a bank is gonna put two banks together and go with a new core in the same project.
You know, merging banks together is quite complex without doing that. Quite often, what happens is, the bank then is looking for what's the next step in their strategy. You know, they're bringing themselves together, obviously, to create a higher top line, but to drive real efficiencies across the bank. Quite often, what we've seen in other markets is when the consultants come in and start talking about merging of systems, then the real system inadequacies come up. We have seen actually in some banks where they've not been able to get the system to really scale when they've brought in the other bank.
What we would do when we see M&A activity going on is we will see how it plays out, and we'll start engaging with the new co to make sure that they're aware, you know, that we're there and there's options to come in on a stage two, but it normally is a stage two. I think on the second question, rip and replace, I wouldn't think that any bank wants to rip and replace. You know, it's definitely not the words that we would use. I, I think that we replace those words with progressive modernization, and this has really been a theme now for the past 12 to 18 months. We have been at the heart of some huge migrations.
You know, bringing 20 million accounts into our system on one weekend and then going live, big bang, across the entire universal bank is really hard, you know, and the lead up to it is really hard. I think we're probably gonna see a higher volume of modernizations 'cause this has to happen. There's no way this cannot change. You can't keep running these systems, but it's gonna be in a progressive way, so it's gonna have to be on a piecemeal basis.
I think that what we've seen now in the last 12 months with our banks, our prospect banks, is that the idea that we can come in in a more composable way and bring them on, believe it or not, a 10-year journey as opposed to a 3-year project, this is very attractive to these large banks to go on that modernization journey. Rip and replace, no. Progressive modernization, yes. That's what we're seeing in the market.
Right. I'm gonna take one very last question. Thomas, did you have one or... ? I think there's a microphone over there.
Hello, Thomas Petrie at BNP Paribas. I was wondering about your appetite to go maybe further down market and after, you know, the community bank space in the US in the context of, you know, one of the big US incumbents trying to make their community bank move to a new, more modern platform in the next years, which I guess open up opportunities for Temenos. Secondly, on the margin targets by 2028, what's embedded in terms of SaaS gross margin expansion, especially in the context, as I think Barb mentioned, you know, extending partnership with new hyperscalers?
Let me take the SaaS margin question first. If we look at the impact, you know, from this BNPL customer, which has exited and, you know, take that away, clearly, you know, the SaaS margin, you know, will expand. It's not resting on this, because clearly we want to enable our SaaS platform to be massively scalable for all the volume, you know, these deals are gonna bring on. We need to invest now ahead. The margin expansion, basically 25 or 26- 28, we're embedded in this, you know, 36% EBIT margin is quite limited. If we get the volume up quicker, clearly you would see improvement potential there.
The question on the community bank that's going to market, this, I think, is exactly where we probably weren't as eloquent in the market before in the U.S. We were quite reactionary, and we jumped on whatever RFP came through the door. We have a mantra inside right now, which is 160, that's it. You know, we know our banks we're targeting. We have an end salesperson or account manager responsible for each bank. They have to deliver us a three-year plan for that bank, a three-year territory plan, which is on the back of going into the bank and talking about how they bring value to that bank over a three-year period. No, we wouldn't go off-piste and then look at a community bank.
Now, that's not to say that in the future, that market we would relook at. I think in the United States, one of the key parts of our strategy is that if we can bring on board, a number of these new logos in 2026, and then we can accelerate through the projects, the key part of that first piece of the strategy is building trust, and that's really important. We're very lucky in that we have two marquee customers now in the United States who have consistently delivered amazing reference calls and reference visits for the new customers we're trying to bring on board. Our first step is we have to expand and have 10 of those voices.
If we have 10 of those voices, I would expect that a U.S. partner will probably come after us and say, "Can we take your platform for the community banks?" We've got to build that big trust first, we're a lot of the way there, but we just need another year or two to build out and have more customers there.
Brilliant. Well, I think we're gonna wrap there. Thank you so much for joining us today, both in the room and everyone joining us via the webcast. We look forward to updating you at our Q1 results. Thank you.