Temenos

Temenos became the world's largest banking software provider by targeting a niche that giants like Oracle and SAP underserved: mid-sized banks in emerging markets. Founded in 1993, the company's cloud-native core banking platform serves 3,000+ banks in 150+ countries - not JPMorgan or HSBC, but regional players in Indonesia, Brazil, Nigeria, and Eastern Europe. This geographic diversification provides growth that saturated Western markets can't match. Temenos's 20-25% operating margins come from high switching costs: once a bank runs on your core system (accounts, transactions, customer data), migration means risking operational collapse. The lesson: in enterprise software, owning the system of record for mid-sized customers in growth markets beats pursuing enterprise logos in mature economies.