T24 Model Bank will provide SMBC with new functionality and high scalability across eight countries in Asia Pacific. SMBC, one of the largest banks in Japan with a presence in 33 countries globally, is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Sumitomo Mitsui Financial Group, one of the world's leading banking groups.

"We are delighted to have successfully rolled out T24 Model Bank in Asia Pacific. The single, pre-configured platform will enable rapid delivery of a consistent set of original products and services across our entire network, whilst flexibly accommodating country specific requirements to meet local needs. Running a single instance of T24 will dramatically cut maintenance costs, provide a real time view of all credit exposures across each corporate relationship and deliver greater understanding of counterparty risk. We move to the next phase of deployment in full confidence that T24 will help us remain at the forefront of product and service innovation to support our customers", SMBC commented.

Prior to implementing T24 Model Bank for Corporate Banking, SMBC largely ran its operations on distributed inhouse systems but also used a small number of third party products. Integrating operations on the Model Bank platform is delivering standardised, automated processes across the region as well as integrated customer and risk information, empowering staff to make better informed decisions.

Temenos worked jointly with SMBC to gather common requirements from all branches and integrate these to build a standard T24 platform for the group with core functionality including deposit, loan and trade components. The two organisations then focused on country specific implementations to deliver rapid branch roll out of a single system, enabling the benefits of T24 to be realised quickly across SMBC's network.

T24 Model Bank, including trade finance, cash management, commercial lending, guarantees and fund transfer, was deployed on an open system including UNIX servers and an Oracle database. Temenos is now working jointly with SMBC to roll out the platform across the rest of the region.

"Having worked closely with SMBC, we are delighted these important milestones have been achieved, paving the way for the continued successful roll out of T24 across the rest of its business network. Temenos' Model Bank is the only core banking product available today which covers the full spectrum of corporate banking functionality and best practice in one single package to provide complete multi-country operational consolidation. Its broad functional coverage will reduce the need for complex interfaces between different SMBC business entities and the system centralisation delivered through T24 will minimise related IT costs and be vital to maintaining SMBC's market leading position; we look forward to working with them on the next phases of deployment." says Andreas Andreades, CEO, Temenos