
Temenos' Mick Fennell Talks AI, Embedded Payments & Partnerships at TCF 2025
Fennell started by saying that instant payments are increasing as the industry is trying to connect local systems to make cross-border payments easier. Because there is an increase of payments happening, and things are getting complicated, banks are using cloud processing to handle the load and keep things running smoothly.
AI is cutting down on false alarms when it comes to fraud and financial crime, while also making operations easier by fixing problems faster. And for customers, AI tools are making things better by helping them understand complicated info. AI is even helping to find the cheapest way to send payments in real-time. He also mentioned that embedded payments are becoming increasingly important as APIs and embedded finance tools are making it possible to connect directly to customer systems. When you add blockchain and stablecoins to the mix, these technologies are enabling faster payments, transparency, and new ways to exchange value.
Then Fennell shared some big news: Standard Chartered is now part of the Temenos Exchange, which a marketplace with over 130 fintech partners that enhance and add value to Temenos. Standard Chartered has been using Temenos' software, but now they're also a partner and the first service they're partnering together on, according to Fennell, is integrating Standard Chartered's FX service, SC ALE.
Temenos will pre-build the integration and w his partnership makes sure they are aligned, that the product is easy to use, and well-maintained, giving banks flexibility and reliability. With over 950 banks using Temenos, this move gives Standard Chartered acces to Temenos client base. This partnership also gives Temenos clients more choices and easier access to further services, including new products related to stablecoins and digital assets in the future.
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The Guardian
an hour ago
- The Guardian
Could AI be accelerating slowdown in the UK job market?
Ask ChatGPT whether artificial intelligence is contributing to Britain's cooling jobs market and the chatbot acknowledges its own role – but adds a caveat: 'Yes, AI is contributing to job losses in the UK, but its impact is nuanced and varies by industry, skill level, and job function.' There are concerns that AI could be one culprit behind the slowdown, as the ascendant technology destroys workers' jobs. The telecoms company BT has said advances in AI could lead it to cut more jobs, having already outlined plans to shed up to 55,000 workers two years ago – including as a result of investment in digital automation. Amazon has warned white-collar staff that their jobs could be replaced, Ocado has cut hundreds of roles to reduce costs while using AI instead, and Microsoft is shedding 9,000 jobs worldwide. Despite these high-profile changes and mounting anecdotal evidence, most economists reckon that, so far, Britain's slowing labour market has little to do with accelerating investment in AI. ChatGPT agrees. It spews out the top five reasons in bullet points. Rising employment costs and higher taxes. Monetary tightening and high interest rates. Broader economic slowdown. Weaker hiring demand. The labour market adjusting to a 'new normal'. Unemployment rose to 4.6% in the three months to the end of April, up from about 4.4% at the start of the year. While there are questions over the reliability of the headline statistics, amid well-documented troubles at the Office for National Statistics, separate figures from HM Revenue and Customs show 276,000 jobs have been lost since the chancellor Rachel Reeves's autumn budget. Business groups complain that hiring has been made more costly by a £25bn rise in employer national insurance contributions, introduced in April, and a 6.7% increase in the national living wage. Bank of England research suggests recruitment plans are being put on ice. Meanwhile, economic growth is expected to remain sluggish in 2025, at about 1% – about half the average annual rate recorded in the decades before the 2008 financial crisis. The outlook comes amid weak consumer confidence and business worries over the hit from Donald Trump's erratic trade war. Lingering high inflation and elevated borrowing costs are also weighing on consumer demand. Such conditions could tempt employers to turn to AI for the answers. Rising wage bills could encourage companies to invest in technology as an alternative to hiring humans by bringing the two propositions closer together in cost. The retailer Next has said it does not expect to cut jobs but plans to use more mechanisation in its warehouses and shops. In January a survey by Boston Consulting Group suggested half of UK companies were planning to redirect investment from staff to AI as a result of rising employment costs. The International Monetary Fund estimates 60% of jobs in advanced economies such as the US and UK are exposed to AI and half of these jobs may be negatively affected. Looking at tech investment to bolster the bottom line is increasingly in vogue. The number of comments made about AI during earnings calls among UK companies have rocketed from a few dozen in the early 2020s to more than 200 in the first quarter of 2025, according to figures from the data provider AlphaSense. Some sectors are braced for a bigger change than others. Research by KPMG suggests jobs in writing and translation, programming, IT-user support, public relations, graphic design and the legal profession could be among the most heavily affected. Already AI-generated adverts, press releases and IT chatbots are proliferating. Younger workers are being particularly hard hit. UK university graduates are facing the toughest jobs market since 2018, while the number of entry-level job vacancies has plummeted by a third since the launch of ChatGPT in November 2022. That is in part because rookie workers are typically given the simplest tasks, which are now easier to automate. There are, however, opportunities. Getting AI to do routine functions could free up workers to do more interesting tasks. While it will destroy jobs, others using the technology will be created. Ministers have trumpeted £44bn of AI investment in Britain since last year, saying it has created 13,250 jobs in 12 months. The government is working with tech firms including Amazon, BT, Google, IBM, Microsoft and Sage to train 7.5 million people in AI skills. 'When you look at any technology, it creates jobs – not just destroys them,' says Yael Selfin, the chief economist at KPMG in the UK. 'There will be destruction. [But] overall, net-net I'm not sure we'll see fewer jobs, but they are likely to be different jobs.' For centuries this has been the example. The worries of the 19th-century Luddite machine-wreckers have turned into a stock example in economics about the fallacies of technological innovation slashing economy-wide job levels. However, there are still big debates about how the transition is managed; how workers are supported, and about how the gains from technological progress are divvied up. For workers: through new, more rewarding, and higher-paid work. For employers and business owners: through higher profits. As the AI revolution gathers pace, so far the signs are mixed. Britain's economic troubles are still the biggest determinant of work opportunities. But technological change is also creeping in.


The Guardian
an hour ago
- The Guardian
‘Workforce crisis': key takeaways for graduates battling AI in the jobs market
ChatGPT can certainly write your university essay – but will it take your job soon after? Rapid advances in artificial intelligence have given rise to fears that the technology will make swathes of the workforce redundant. Graduates are seen as particularly vulnerable because entry-level jobs such as form-filling and basic data entry are strongly associated with the 'drudge work' that AI systems – which perform tasks that typically have required human intelligence – could do instead. Over the past two and a half years the availability of such positions has dropped by a third, and last month it was reported that graduates are facing the toughest UK job market since 2018. The Guardian spoke to some of the UK's biggest recruitment agencies and employment experts for their views on the impact of AI on current and future opportunities for those entering the jobs market. Here are six key takeaways from what they said: A shifting graduate labour market is not unusual, said Kirsten Barnes, head of digital platform at Bright Network, which connects graduates and young professionals to employers. 'Any shifts in the graduate job market this year – which typically fluctuates by 10-15% – appear to be driven by a combination of factors, including wider economic conditions and the usual fluctuations in business demand, rather than a direct impact from AI alone. We're not seeing a consistent trend across specific sectors,' she said. Claire Tyler, head of insights at the Institute for Student Employers (ISE), which represents major graduate employers, said that among companies recruiting fewer graduates 'none of them have said it's down to AI'. Some recruitment specialists cited the recent increase in employer national insurance contributions as a factor in slowing down entry-level recruitment. Ed Steer, chief executive off Sphere Digital Recruitment, which hires for junior marketer and sales roles in tech and media, said graduate vacancies have fallen from 400 a year in 2021 to an expected 75 this year. He put the drop down to businesses wanting to hire more experienced applicants who can 'deliver for their customers on day one'. However, Auria Heanley, co-founder of Oriel Partners, which recruits for personal assistant roles, has seen a 30% drop in entry-level roles this year. She said she had 'no doubt' that 'AI combined with wider economic uncertainty, is making it much tougher for graduates to find these roles'. Felix Mitchell, co-chief executive at Instant Impact, which recruits for mid-sized businesses, said jobs related to Stem [science, technology, engineering and mathematics] were the most disrupted. 'I do think that the evidence suggests that AI will likely be a net job creator, but the losses are happening faster than the gains.' Major tech companies such as Microsoft are trumpeting the impact of AI agents – systems that perform human-level cognitive tasks autonomously – as tools that can be competent assistants in the workplace, with early adopters including the consultancy McKinsey and the law firm Clifford Chance. Dario Amodei, the boss of AI the developer Anthropic, has warned that the technology could wipe out half of all entry-level office jobs in the next five years. James Reed, chief executive of the employment agency Reed, said AI would transform the whole jobs market from now on: 'This is the year of AI… lots of businesses are really doubling down on it, investing in it. 'This feels like the year that AI is really changing and getting embedded – for better or for worse.' Sophie O'Brien, chief executive of Pollen Careers, which caters for early-career and entry-level roles, said AI had 'accelerated' a decline in graduate recruitment that has been going on for a few years now: 'The job market could look vastly different in even a year's time.' She added: 'For a lot of professional, desk-based jobs where you are processing information on a laptop it's entirely obvious that a huge number of those jobs over the next few years are going to be redundant. There's a workforce crisis that is going to happen and I don't know if we are ready for this.' David Bell, at the executive search firm Odgers, said law firms are demanding AI competence from graduates. 'As part of the interview process for the graduate intake they are asking them about their understanding and usage of AI,' he said. 'Anyone who has not been using ChatGPT or the equivalent will struggle to be taken on board.' James Milligan, global head of Stem at recruitment multinational Hays, agreed. 'If they do not have that second skill set around how to use AI then they are definitely going to be at a disadvantage,' he said. 'Jobs don't die, they evolve and change. I think we are in a process of evolutionary change at the moment.' Chris Morrow, managing director at Digitalent, an agency that specialises in recruiting AI-related roles, said that rather than the technology taking jobs it was creating a new category of AI-adjacent positions: 'It is opening windows to jobs that did not exist 12 months ago, like AI ethics and prompt engineering. New roles are being born.' With such demand for expertise, universities are being urged to adapt courses accordingly. Louise Ballard, a co-founder of which helps companies adopt AI technology, says there is a problem with 'basic AI literacy skills' not being taught in higher education. 'You people are not getting the training they need,' she said. 'The skills required at being good at AI are not necessarily the academic skills you have acquired.' The real risk, said Morrow, was not that AI takes jobs but that educational institutions and government policy fail to keep up. 'Universities need to embed AI learning across all their subjects,' he said. AI is an obvious aid for filling out CVs and forms as well as writing cover letters. Many of the organisations contacted by the Guardian reported a surge in applications now that filing one has become easier. Bright Network said the number of graduates and undergraduates using AI for their applications has risen from 38% last year to 50%. Teach First, a major graduate employer, said it plans to accelerate use of vetting processes that don't involve writing to reduce the impact of computer-drafted entries. The ISE's Tyler warned that excessive use of AI in applications could results in employers ending recruitment campaigns early and targeting specific groups with recruitment work. Ending such drives early could also affect under-represented groups, she said. Errors that were once seen as red flags might now be seen in a different way, says James Reed. 'In the old days we used to screen out CVs that had spelling mistakes because we'd think the person isn't paying attention to detail or is approaching things with a casual mindset. Now if you see someone's CV with a spelling mistake you think: 'Wow, that's actually written by a person – it's the real thing.'' Small-to-medium-sized enterprises, or businesses that employ fewer than 250 people, were also singled out as an opportunity for graduates. Pollen's O'Brien pointed out that SMEs are the biggest employers in the UK, at 60% of the workforce, and any lack of AI knowledge on their part could present an employment opportunity. 'A lot of these businesses don't know how to use AI, they are scared of AI and there is a huge opportunity for young graduates to be bringing those skills into small companies that are still hiring,' she said. 'If you bring these skills into a small business you could revolutionise that business.' Dan Hawes, co-founder of the Graduate Recruitment Bureau, said there were thousands of 'under the radar' employers below the level of big corporates who were 'desperate for brainy individuals'. 'There is this huge, hidden market and it gets rarely reported,' he said.


The Guardian
an hour ago
- The Guardian
Teach First job applicants will get in-person interviews after more apply using AI
One of the UK's biggest recruiters is accelerating a plan to switch towards more frequent face-to-face assessments as university graduates become increasingly reliant on using artificial intelligence to apply for jobs. Teach First, a charity which fast-tracks graduates into teaching jobs, said it planned to bring forward a move away from predominantly written assignments – where AI could give applicants hidden help – to setting more assessments where candidates carry out tasks such as giving 'micro lessons' to assessors. The move comes as the number of people using AI for job applications has risen from 38% last year, to 50% this year, according to a study by the graduate employment specialist Bright Network. Patrick Dempsey, the executive director for programme talent at Teach First, said there had been a near-30% increase in applications so far this year on the same period last year, with AI playing a significant role. Dempsey said the surge in demand for jobs was partly due to a softening in the labour market, but the use of automation for applications was allowing graduates to more easily apply for multiple jobs simultaneously. 'The shift from written assessment to task-based assessment is something we feel the need to accelerate,' he said. Dempsey said much of the AI use went undetected but there could be tell-tale signs. 'There are instances where people are leaving the tail end of a ChatGPT message in an application answer, and of course they get rejected,' he said. A leading organisation in graduate recruitment said the proportion of students and university leavers using AI to apply for jobs had risen to five out of 10 applicants. Bright Network, which connects graduates and young professionals to employers, found half of graduates and undergraduates now used AI for their applications. More than a quarter of companies questioned in a survey of 15,000 people will be setting guidelines for AI usage in job applications, in time for the next recruitment season. Kirsten Barnes, head of the digital platform at Bright Network, said employers had noticed a 'surge' in applications. 'AI tools make it easier for candidates of any age – not just graduates – to apply to many, many different roles,' she said. 'Employers have been saying to us that what they're seeing is a huge surge in the volume of applications that they're receiving.' Breakthroughs in AI have coincided with downward pressure on the graduate and junior jobs market. Dartmouth Partners, a recruitment agency specialising in the financial services sector, said it was increasingly seeing applicants using keywords written in white on their CVs. The words are not visible to the human eye, but would instruct a system to push the candidate to the next phase of the recruitment process if a prospective employer was using AI to screen applications. Sign up to Business Today Get set for the working day – we'll point you to all the business news and analysis you need every morning after newsletter promotion Vacancies for graduate jobs, apprenticeships, internships and junior jobs with no degree requirement have dropped by 32% since the launch of ChatGPT in November 2022, according to research released last month by the job search site Adzuna. These entry-level jobs now account for 25% of the market in the UK, down from 28.9% in 2022, it found. Last month, another job search site, Indeed, reported that university graduates were facing the toughest job market since 2018, finding the number of roles advertised for recent graduates had fallen 33% in mid-June compared with the same point last year. The Institute of Student Employers said the graduate and school-leaver market as a whole was not declining as rapidly as reported, however. Its survey of 69 employers showed job vacancies aimed at graduates were down by 7% but school-leaver vacancies were up by 23% – meaning there was an overall increase of 1% in a market earmarked for AI impact. Group GTI, a charity that helps students move into employment, said job postings on UK university careers job boards were up by 8% this year compared with last year. Interviews with graduate recruitment agencies and experts have found that AI has yet to cause severe disruption to the market for school and university leavers – but change is inevitable and new joiners to the white-collar economy must become skilled in AI to stand a chance of progressing. James Reed, the chief executive of the Reed employment agency, said he 'feels sorry' for young people who have racked up debt studying for degrees and are encountering a tough jobs market. 'I think universities should be looking at this and thinking quite carefully about how they prepare young people,' he said. He added that AI would transform the entire job market. 'This change is fundamental and five years from now it's going to look very different – the whole job market,' he said.