On 4 December 2025, the Asian Bankers Association & Temenos organized a webinar on Banking on Artificial Intelligence. The successful webinar was moderated by Frankie Wai, BSG Director APAC, Temenos, and featured Chee Kiat (C.K.) Loy, Principal Business Consultant, Temenos and gathered over 650 registrants from 38 countries. We present you here a summary of the presentation and panel discussion.
PRESENTATION
Frankie Wai opened by emphasizing that banks across Asia-Pacific are at a pivotal moment in adopting AI. While enthusiasm is high, many institutions still face challenges around data readiness, architecture, and responsible AI governance. The session aimed to go beyond hype, presenting real-world use cases, market insights, and governance frameworks necessary for safe, value-driven AI deployment.
C.K. Loy noted that AI adoption in banking remains early-stage.
Only 54% of banks have initiated AI projects, with nearly half still experimenting or developing capabilities, leaving significant greenfield opportunities. Banks focus on improving productivity, enhancing customer experience, and supporting staff through automation. AI is increasingly seen as a tool to liberate human talent, reducing manual workloads and enabling employees to focus on higher-value activities. Vendor selection now heavily favors AI-ready solutions, with 83% seeking strong use-case capabilities and 69% preferring explicitly AI-driven platforms.
Temenos’ AI strategy combines embedded GenAI, agentic AI, and a no-code AI Studio to scale intelligence across the customer lifecycle. Embedded GenAI allows employees to interact with core banking systems conversationally, improving transactions, reporting, and user support. Agentic
AI enables specialized AI agents to make complex decisions across workflows, improving operational efficiency, customer experience, and financial crime mitigation. AI Studio empowers banks to create their own AI agents for sales, risk, operations, and customer service without specialist skills. Practical applications span product management, branch operations, relationship management, and fraud detection, demonstrating measurable business impact while enhancing human work rather than replacing it.
PANEL DISCUSSION
The panel discussion, moderated by Frankie Wai and featuring Michael Araneta (AWS), Arvind Aswami (Red Hat), and C.K. Loy (Temenos), focused on bridging the gap between AI intent and implementation. Michael highlighted AI’s accelerating adoption across loan origination, service management, fraud detection, and customer engagement, with emerging agentic AI enabling collaboration among specialized AI agents to handle complex workflows. Arvind emphasized trust, governance, and responsible AI, stressing explainable AI techniques, ethical data use, bias mitigation, privacy, human accountability, and the democratization of AI to foster adoption.
C.K. Loy stressed measurable business objectives, strategic alignment, and high-impact use cases, alongside KPIs, data governance, and feedback loops to ensure sustainable AI deployment.
Successful AI adoption requires modern, open, and secure architectures, a culture of experimentation and continuous learning, and systematic stakeholder engagement. Banks achieve impact through hyper-personalization to improve customer experience, real-time KYC/AML monitoring for compliance, and AI application in customer distress, fraud management, and operational efficiency. Choosing AI solutions should prioritize addressing meaningful problems, strong partnership with providers for execution, and ease of adoption for internal teams.
Key Takeaways:
- Experimentation and Adoption: Test AI against real business problems to achieve measurable impact.
- Responsible AI: Embed transparency, explainability, and accountability to maintain trust and regulatory compliance.
- Human-Centric Transformation: Use AI to enhance human roles, improve customer experience, and drive operational efficiency.
The video recording of the webinar is available at the ABA YouTube channel.
