Interswitch Partners with Temenos to Scale Digital Banking Services Across Africa

WHY THIS MATTERS

The collaborative alliance announced between global core banking software giant Temenos and African fintech trailblazer Interswitch Group on June 4, 2026, represents a massive structural upgrade for financial inclusion across sub-Saharan Africa. Over the past decade, Africa has established itself as a world-class sandbox for localized digital transactions, largely driven by mobile money deployment and rapid merchant acceptance rails.

However, a steep technological divide persists between the front-end transaction experience and the backend banking infrastructure. While a consumer can easily pay for retail items using an digital wallet, the underlying regional banks, microfinance institutions, and tier-2 credit unions that anchor rural economies are frequently trapped on rigid, expensive, legacy on-premises core ledgers.

Temenos (SIX: TEMN), a global leader in banking technology, and Interswitch Group, a leading integrated payments and digital commerce company in Africa, today announced a collaboration, wherein Interswitch will adopt Temenos technology to enhance its digital banking capabilities, supporting its growth and expanding access to modern financial services across the continent. 

Interswitch will use Temenos solutions – across core banking, digital banking, payments, wealth management and financial crime – to provide cloud-hosted and on-premises managed services to banks and financial institutions across Africa. This will enable institutions to progressively transform their banking platform and evolve to more customer-centric business models. The service will initially support key African markets including Nigeria, Ghana, Côte d’Ivoire, Kenya and others.

Jonah Adams, Managing Director for Digital Infrastructure & Managed Services (Systegra) at Interswitch, said: “By adopting Temenos’ cloud-native, composable platform, Interswitch gains the flexibility and scalability to accelerate its next phase of growth and deliver banking services that meet the needs of African markets. 

This is a pivotal moment for Interswitch as we accelerate our expansion beyond payments and reimagine digital banking for Africa. Our partnership with Temenos is strategic in that it allows us to introduce a highly configurable banking platform that leverages the latest cloud technologies into our technology stack. Temenos delivers on this and brings an unmatched breadth and depth of capability to support our vision and scale our services across the continent.”

William Moroney, Chief Revenue Officer, Temenos, commented: “Interswitch is an important new customer and partner for Temenos in Africa. The collaboration underscores the adaptability of our platform to power innovative banking services tailored to the needs of African markets. Interswitch’s strong presence across the continent also extends our reach and further strengthens our ecosystem and partner network.” 

Widely known for its Quickteller and Verve brands, Interswitch operates in 32 African countries, supporting more than 300 financial institutions. Through Quickteller, its digital payments and services platform, Interswitch has played a significant role in shaping consumer and merchant payments. Verve International, a domestic payment cards and tokens scheme and a subsidiary of Interswitch, recently surpassed 100 million payment cards issued. The business continues to drive innovation in tokenization, reinforcing its position as one of Nigeria’s most widely used payment cards and token platforms.

FF NEWS TAKE

Interswitch is executing a highly calculated corporate transformation, expanding from an isolated African transactional network to become the premier digital utility operator for the continent’s banking sector. Established over twenty years ago by founder Mitchell Elegbe, the Lagos-headquartered company built the fundamental transaction infrastructure for Nigeria’s financial economy through its consumer portal Quickteller and its dominant local card network Verve International—which recently surpassed a massive milestone of 100 million active payment cards issued.

Under Jonah Adams, Managing Director for Digital Infrastructure & Managed Services (Systegra), the integration of Temenos’ cloud-native, composable technology stack shifts Interswitch into the highly profitable world of Core-Banking-as-a-Service (CBaaS). Initially targeting high-velocity economic hubs including Nigeria, Ghana, Kenya, and Côte d’Ivoire, Interswitch will host and manage Temenos’ full core suite—including advanced digital banking pipelines, multi-asset wealth management dashboards, unified real-time payment rails, and AI-driven financial crime screening engines.

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