New Partnership Aims to De-Risk Data for Temenos Transact Banks

WIESBADEN, Germany – February 18, 2026 – In a move set to bolster data security across a significant portion of the global banking sector, German data security specialist comforte AG and Swiss technology services provider ITSS Global have announced a strategic collaboration. The partnership introduces a co-developed solution designed to protect sensitive data for the vast network of financial institutions utilizing the Temenos Transact core banking platform.

This new offering directly confronts the mounting challenge of securing clear-text personally identifiable information (PII) and payment data. As banks accelerate their digital transformation, the risk of exposing this sensitive information across sprawling IT environments has become a critical concern for executives, regulators, and customers alike.

The Growing Data Security Imperative

The financial industry is at a crossroads. The push to adopt data-driven programs for fraud prevention, personalized services, and AI-powered insights is creating unprecedented opportunities. However, this same digital acceleration has exponentially increased the attack surface for cybercriminals. The banking sector has seen a reported 238% surge in cyberattacks over the past year, with the average cost of a single incident climbing into the millions.

This heightened threat environment is compounded by a complex and unforgiving regulatory landscape. Mandates like the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS 4.0) and the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) impose stringent requirements on how personal and payment data is handled, stored, and protected. Non-compliance is not an option, with potential fines reaching up to 4% of a company's global turnover.

For banks running on robust platforms like Temenos Transact—a market leader recognized by analysts at Gartner, Forrester, and IDC—the challenge is not about the core system's stability, but about protecting data as it flows from the core to interconnected analytics platforms, cloud services, and third-party applications. Traditional perimeter security, while still necessary, is no longer sufficient. The modern consensus among security experts is that the data itself must be the new perimeter.

“The modern threat landscape demands a shift from securing systems to securing the data itself,” said Henning Horst, CTO at comforte, in the official announcement. “Today’s regulators and auditors expect readable data to stay out of places it doesn’t belong.”

A Data-Centric Approach to Protection

The joint solution from comforte and ITSS Global is engineered around this data-centric philosophy. It leverages comforte’s flagship TAMUNIO data security platform to embed protection directly into the data layer. The core technology employed is tokenization, a process that replaces sensitive data elements with a non-sensitive equivalent, or 'token'.

Unlike encryption, which simply scrambles data, tokenization removes the original sensitive data from the environment entirely, storing it in a secure, centralized vault. The token retains the format and properties of the original data, allowing business processes—such as transaction processing, reporting, and analytics—to function without interruption. This format-preserving nature is crucial, as it allows banks to use protected data for vital operations without exposing the underlying PII or payment details.

The system provides for centralized policy management and, critically, controlled de-tokenization. This ensures that only explicitly authorized applications or users can revert a token back to its original value, creating a clear and auditable trail of access. By protecting data at the source and keeping it protected throughout its lifecycle, the solution drastically reduces the value of any data that might be compromised in a breach.

Seamless Integration for a Banking Behemoth

A key strength of this new offering is its deep integration with Temenos Transact, one of the world's most widely used core banking systems, serving over 3,000 financial institutions, including 41 of the top 50 global banks. The sheer scale of the Temenos ecosystem makes a standardized, easily deployable security solution highly valuable.

The partnership leverages the specialized expertise of both companies. comforte AG brings over two decades of experience in data-centric security, with a client roster that includes industry giants like Visa and Mastercard. ITSS Global, a multi-certified Temenos partner since 2001, contributes its deep understanding of the Temenos architecture and its experience in managing complex modernization projects for over 300 clients.

ITSS will deliver the integration as part of its managed Temenos services, promising a smoother implementation that avoids the costly and time-consuming custom development often associated with integrating security solutions into complex core banking environments.

“As banks modernize their Temenos environments, the real security challenge is no longer the perimeter. It is protecting sensitive data as it moves across core systems, analytics platforms, and the cloud,” noted Somasundaram M, Regional Sales Director, MEA at ITSS. “Through our partnership with comforte, we enable Temenos clients to embed data-centric tokenization directly into their transformation journeys.”

Turning Compliance into an Enabler

Ultimately, the collaboration aims to reframe data security from a restrictive compliance burden into a strategic business enabler. By ensuring that data remains protected yet usable, banks can more confidently pursue innovation. AI models can be trained on rich, tokenized datasets without privacy risks. Analytics teams can derive insights without accessing raw PII. And the adoption of cloud services becomes less daunting when the data being moved is already intrinsically secure.

This approach directly supports compliance with evolving mandates like PCI DSS 4.0 by reducing the scope of systems that handle live payment data. It also aligns with the principles of 'privacy by design' enshrined in GDPR, demonstrating a proactive commitment to data protection.

By providing a clear path to securing sensitive information within one of the industry's most critical platforms, the comforte and ITSS partnership provides a powerful tool for banks navigating the dual imperatives of digital innovation and ironclad security. This allows financial institutions to build their future on a foundation of protected data, fostering trust and enabling sustainable growth in an increasingly digital world.