The research was conducted by the T24 Performance Management Team, a new Temenos research function that will continually evaluate and improve the performance and scalability of T24 for retail banking operations.

The testing environment, created to reflect real-world retail banking activity volumes, was made up of 15 million customers and 25 million accounts, spread across the personal and small business segments and using a wide range of products through multiple channels including branch, ATM, POS and the internet. A broad range of back office transactions were applied during testing to reflect realistic retail banking activity. The platform used, comprising three IBM Power 570 servers with POWER6 processors and a p5-595 database server with POWER5+ processors to run the Oracle database, was selected to reflect a typical, real life configuration for this type of retail bank to ensure real-world performance delivered with superior cost of ownership. This configuration was neither the maximum or most powerful that could have been applied in the test.

The scenario called for the solution to process 1,500 transactions per second (tps) during the peak period of the working day. This was created from the peak period of branch processing, plus high volume batch payments and (to reflect an unlikely worst case) peak internet usage simultaneously. The benchmark comfortably exceeded this target with the system processing in excess of 2,600 tps. Tests on a set of payments and enquiries transactions designed to demonstrate maximum throughput in performance tests of this kind, resulted in over 9,460 tps for the same hardware configuration.

The project was undertaken by a joint Temenos and IBM team, in the IBM performance testing facilities in Montpelier, France, during May 2008. The Temenos members of the team created the T24 environment, managed the application and simulated the online and batch transactions. The IBM team members undertook the configuguration and tuning of the database server, application server, operating system and provided performance measurement and tooling. This is part of an ongoing programme of T24 performance testing based upon real-case situations.

Andreas Andreades, CEO, Temenos, says: "Having recently announced Bank of Shanghai's successful implementation of T24 to support 11 million customer accounts and up to two and a half million daily transactions, these figures further confirm T24's ability to comfortably support the high activity volumes and operational needs for most retail banks in the world. At Temenos, with the support of IBM, we have proven that we can combine the unique software architecture and package integrity of T24 with the most demanding scalability requirements of retail banks today. As such we are able to fundamentally transform the economics of running IT operations for a retail bank wishing to adopt our package approach. This is particularly relevant in the current environment with most leading banks wishing to transform their balance sheets in favour of lower cost and lower risk consumer deposits".

Andre Loustau, CTO, Temenos, commented: "The test has proved very successful and it was particularly rewarding that these results were achieved on the standard R8 model bank release which is now in GA since April 2008. The test also confirmed T24's excellent ability to fully exploit the available processing power. The new T24 Performance Management Team are now analysing the results, but we already know that these exceptional figures can be easily exceeded in future releases of the system or by using more powerful hardware to linearly scale performance".

T24 is now confirmed as a core banking system comfortably capable of servicing the needs of cross-sector banking operations ranging from small to in excess of 10 million accounts. T24 Model bank is a packaged core banking software that provides banks with unparalleled richness in functionality on an integrated, service orientated architecture with support from front to back office. T24 Model Bank includes pre-configured, industry best practices for each banking sector, enabling banks to optimise operations and processes while remaining agile, flexible and responsive to business change. Its highly automated implementation approach delivers short implementations with a rapid and measurable return on investment. Fully integrated CRM and business intelligence capabilities provide a high degree of customer intimacy and a clear and deep understanding of the enterprise including its risk and performance.

T24 incorporates modern technology including a comprehensive Service Orientated Architecture (SOA). It's also fully enabled for standard SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol) web services, and BPEL process execution. T24 is compliant with industry leading ESBs (Enterprise Service Buses) and can be deployed on fully scalable, multi-server n-tier architecture. It provides a full front-to-back solution from electronic delivery channels such as mobile devices and internet banking right through to settlement, general ledger and other back office functions all in a fully integrated, reliable and cost effective environment. Temenos' total commitment to open standards enables its customers to benefit from the latest advances in technology ensuring business agility, continuity, data integrity and reduced downtime delivering a significant, immediate and ongoing return on investment.