Two interviews filmed by The Fintech Times at Sibos in Miami. Will Moroney on why three quarters of bank customers are open to leaving, and Mick Fennell on agentic payments, tokenised deposits and the digital currencies banks will have to choose between.
By Mark Walker, CEO and Editorial Director, The Fintech Times
Sibos came to Miami at the end of September with the usual mix of payments announcements, panel debate and corridor conversation. Temenos arrived with new research. The Banking Expectation Gap: Global Consumer Edition, produced by Celent and released at the show, surveyed more than 2,500 banking consumers across five regions and found that nearly three quarters of them are at best moderately satisfied with their main bank. The Fintech Times covered the report in a pre-event feature. At the show, we sat down on camera with two of the people shaping Temenos’s response to it.
The first interview is with Will Moroney, Chief Revenue Officer, on what the research means for banks and why AI has changed the argument for core modernisation. The second is with Mick Fennell, Business Line Director for Payments, who presented on agentic commerce and programmable money on the Sibos exhibitor stage and who has a memorable way of sorting the digital currencies banks are being asked to support. Both full-length conversations are embedded below.
Will Moroney: retention is not loyalty
The research set out to measure a gap Temenos had already seen in its own client base, between the service customers expect and the service they receive. The finding that surprised Moroney most was its size. Three quarters of respondents described themselves as moderately happy with their bank, a group Temenos has labelled the switchable middle.
“Banking customers have changed fundamentally in the way they interact with banks, especially the younger generations. Many are holding multiple relationships with different banks and they can switch quite easily. So being moderately happy is normally not good enough for a bank to retain, definitely not to retain all the services of the customer.”
Payments sit at the centre of the problem, and Moroney’s explanation is about frequency and stress rather than technology. A customer might take out two mortgages in a lifetime and a handful of personal loans, but payments are a daily touchpoint, usually made under some pressure: a bill to pay, money to move to a friend. The benchmark has moved as well. Customers no longer compare their bank with other banks. They compare it with social media platforms and ride-hailing apps, and expect the same immediacy.
That leads to the distinction Moroney says Temenos spends most of its time explaining to bank leadership teams. Retention is a widely tracked measure and it can mislead, because a customer who has not closed an account may still be moving a growing share of their financial life to fintechs offering a payments service here or a micro-lending product there.
“Retention doesn’t necessarily mean loyalty. Retention is a big measure within a bank, and you can be a little bit misled by retention numbers.”
On core modernisation, Moroney is generous about what banks have achieved in digital channels and in instant payments, with Swift among the institutions he credits. The difficulty is that each of those advances adds load to back-office systems built for a previous generation. Straight-through processing in the digital layer should be matched by straight-through processing behind it, and that is where the bottleneck sits. What has changed, in his account, is that AI now gives banks a way to understand decades of patched legacy code, business process and data before they attempt to replace it, which removes much of the risk that has kept large banks from starting.
“The opportunity that we didn’t have decades ago with AI now is to actually understand what’s going on in the legacy systems, to understand the business process, to understand the data sets and even to understand the code. AI will enable us and will enable banks to accelerate now the movement onto a newer core banking system.”
Asked for the one thought he wanted Sibos delegates to take home, Moroney returned to the research: three quarters of their customers are in the switchable middle, and even healthy retention figures can hide that some of those customers are already trying other providers.
Mick Fennell: the four musketeers of digital money
Fennell’s conversation starts with a reality check on agentic commerce. AI agents are already used throughout the payments process, he says, but agentic commerce proper means machine-to-machine decisions and payments, and the strongest early use cases are on the corporate side, where proofs of concept and pilots are under way. The question for banks is whether their infrastructure can carry it. Cloud native, event driven and API first are the table stakes; a bank still running on legacy systems will struggle.
What breaks first at machine speed is a mix of capacity and control. Fraud protection has to work at a pace no human review can match, which means agreeing with the customer in advance what their agent may do, how much and how often, and then monitoring to that service level. Fennell compares it to direct debit mandates: a familiar discipline applied to a much faster, higher-volume flow. His view is that current controls are not obsolete but need enhancing rather than replacing.
“We’re still moving money. There’s still an account at the end. There’s still going to be a debit and a credit. So there’s an infrastructure in place and an understanding of those things. We’re now just adding on top of that, making it quicker, faster, smarter.”
Then come the musketeers. Fennell sorts digital currencies into four categories and gives each a character. Central bank digital currencies are public money, Athos: proud, straightforward, the moral compass of the group. Stablecoins are private money, Porthos: flamboyant, pushing things forward, good company but a little over the top, and to be approached with care. Tokenised deposits are bank money, Aramis: keen to improve things but content to work within the rules. Cryptocurrency is D’Artagnan: exciting, unbacked and a case of buyer beware.
“Tokenised deposits are where the rubber hits the road for the banks, because this is about bank money. You’re taking the deposits of the customer and tokenising them for use on blockchain and to move them around. It follows the same rails and the same regulation. It’s easy for the banks to do because it’s the money that they’re managing for the customer. They’re just doing a new service for them.”
Each bank, he argues, has to assemble its own team, and it may not be all for one. Most will concentrate on tokenised deposits and, where live use cases exist, CBDCs, with the digital euro the largest in train. The decisions are about legal risk, which services to wrap around each asset, and whether customers can redeem at par under stress. The bank remains the gatekeeper of trust.
On cross-border payments, Fennell is candid about the limits of stablecoins today. Around 97 per cent are denominated in dollars, so a payment from Malawi to Japan still has to find its way back into yen, and the on-ramp and off-ramp infrastructure to do that at scale does not yet exist. Where stablecoins are already working is inside large corporates and multinationals moving funds between their own entities, where both ends can be managed. What they offer there is real-time settlement and transparency on a shared ledger.
The customer, he insists, does not care which rail a payment travels on. Fennell returns to the G20 objectives for cross-border payments, cost, access, speed and transparency, and says tokenised money with smart contracts already helps on three of the four. Cost will follow once liquidity pools deepen. Tokenisation will not stop at payments either: lending and trade finance are next, and the task for a platform provider is to manage traditional and tokenised finance in one interoperable place.
“The future of banking is tokenised, or at least a significant part of banking. What banks need to do is to be able to provide a single platform that manages both traditional and tokenised finance in the one place.”
Two practical problems round off the conversation. Governments and regulators worry about losing control of money movement within their borders, which is why adoption is uneven across markets even where rules now exist. And banks face a liquidity question nobody has fully answered: correspondent banks already hold pools in many currencies, and nobody can hold liquidity in hundreds of stablecoins without fragmenting their balance sheet. Technology selection matters, Fennell says, but sorting out liquidity, custody and trust matters more.
Watch and share
Watch the full interviews on The Fintech Times: Will Moroney at https://thefintechtimes.com/sibos-miami-2026-will-moroney-chief-revenue-officer-temenos/ and Mick Fennell at https://thefintechtimes.com/sibos-miami-2026-mick-fennell-business-line-director-payments-temenos/.
Both were recorded at Sibos 2026 at the Miami Beach Convention Center, 28 September to 1 October. Short clips from each are being published on The Fintech Times LinkedIn and X channels over the coming week.
Our pre-event feature on the Celent research, Banks face a ‘switchable middle’ as loyalty drivers shift, is available here: https://thefintechtimes.com/banks-face-a-switchable-middle-as-loyalty-drivers-shift/
The post Temenos At Sibos 2026: The Switchable Middle, The Four Musketeers And What Banks Must Fix Next appeared first on The Fintech Times.
