Banks risk rapid trust loss when rare touchpoints fail

At the Temenos Community Forum in Copenhagen, Temenos chief product and technology officer Barb Morgan used her keynote to warn that banks can lose customer trust in seconds when rarely used touchpoints fail. She cautioned that some failures “could have an impact to someone’s life.”

Morgan pointed to specific examples of low-volume touchpoints that merit attention: one-off loan disbursements, account recovery processes, dispute resolution, identity checks and high-value payments that occur rarely for a given customer. Problems in these areas, she said, can cause direct harm to individuals and can damage a bank’s reputation.

She noted that these failures typically occur in edge cases or exception flows and do not normally appear in standard load testing. Because such transactions are infrequent, they are often missed in planning and quality assurance.

To address the risk, Morgan urged banks to map end-to-end customer journeys to surface weak points, increase monitoring of rare transactions and apply targeted resilience measures to low-volume flows. She recommended strengthening exception handling, improving staff support for escalations and running scenario-based tests on seldom-used processes.

The Temenos Community Forum gathered banking and technology leaders to discuss product, operations and risk. Morgan used the event to emphasize that attention to the resilience of rare or exception-driven processes is needed alongside efforts on scale and performance.