When a major financial services firm couldn’t scale their payment settlements during peak load, watching execution times balloon from sub-seconds to 45+ seconds, they knew their homegrown workflow system had hit its limit. Within weeks of adopting Temporal Cloud, those same settlements ran at sub-second speeds even during their highest volume events.
This story, captured in Forrester’s Total Economic Impact™ study, reflects what’s happening across the banking industry: institutions are replacing fragile, homegrown workflow systems with Temporal Cloud and seeing immediate, measurable returns.
The reliability dividend: $14.3M in preserved revenue#
Every bank knows the true cost of downtime. Forrester’s analysis quantifies what Temporal Cloud customers already experience: one to two major outages avoided annually, each preventing roughly 20 hours of downtime.
For the composite organization in the study (modeled on real Temporal customers), this translates to:
- $14.3 million in preserved revenue over three years
- $1.5 million in protected operating profit
- Near-elimination of manual payment reconciliation processes
One engineering manager put it simply: “Temporal has never caused an incident. We have two exact examples of teams saying Temporal made them NOT have an incident while other systems were failing.”
Speed that compounds: Features delivered 50% faster#
Banks operate in a world where competitive advantage is measured in weeks, not quarters. The Forrester study documents teams consistently delivering features in half the time:
Before Temporal:
- Three months to build a new payment feature
- Fear of making changes to critical workflows
- Weeks spent on distributed systems complexity
With Temporal:
- 1.5 months for the same feature
- Changes that once took months completed in days
- Engineers focused on business logic, not infrastructure
A VP of Engineering captured the shift with one remarkable example: “What was going to be a several-month effort became twelve lines of code. We spent longer testing it than coding it.”
The productivity multiplier effect#
The study reveals a pattern that CFOs will appreciate: productivity gains that grow with adoption. Engineers directly using Temporal see a 15% productivity improvement, but the impact doesn’t stop there. Adjacent teams benefit from the more stable foundation, capturing an additional 1% productivity lift even without touching Temporal directly.
Starting with just nine developers in Year 1 and growing to 60 by Year 3, the composite organization captured over $1 million in productivity value — hours previously lost to incident response now reinvested in innovation. The compound effect becomes clear as adoption spreads: each team that adopts Temporal makes the next team’s adoption easier, creating a virtuous cycle of improvement.
Real paths to production: Weeks, not quarters#
Unlike traditional infrastructure overhauls, teams describe remarkably fast paths to value:
- Week 1–2: Platform running, prototype working
- Month 1–3: First production use case live
- Month 3–6: Full migration of initial workflows
The learning curve proves equally manageable. The study models 50 hours of training per developer, aligning with the one to two weeks teams consistently report for becoming productive. As one senior engineering manager put it: “Temporal is a quick spin-up.”
The Cloud advantage: Focus on business, not infrastructure#
For organizations that previously self-hosted Temporal, the Cloud migration math was clear: “If we had to host our own Temporal, we would need four more high-level SRE engineers. That’s $2 million a year in salary and benefits.” — Engineering Manager, Financial Services
The composite organization’s total Temporal Cloud investment over three years:
- Cloud services: $811K (risk-adjusted PV)
- Implementation and management: $345K
- Developer training: $226K
- Total: $1.38M against $4.16M in benefits
Built for banking: Security and compliance by design#
For regulated environments, the architecture matters as much as the economics. The study confirms what banking security teams need to hear:
- Data sovereignty maintained: Temporal never receives or processes sensitive customer data
- Encryption supported: End-to-end encryption available for workflow data
- Compliance-ready: Retained storage for audit trails and regulatory requirements
“We had a security team member audit all our SaaS solutions including Temporal and had no qualms. Nothing came up as an issue.”
Beyond the numbers: Strategic advantages#
While Forrester’s model focuses on quantifiable benefits, interviewed organizations highlighted additional strategic value:
Talent and retention#
“We’ve had people specifically apply because they want to work with Temporal,” one senior engineer reported. *“It’s increased the quality of our hiring pipeline.” *
Developer retention improved as well, with teams attributing reduced turnover to the improved daily work experience Temporal enables.
Enabling transformation initiatives#
Multiple banks reported Temporal as crucial for monolith decomposition and core modernization efforts — transformational initiatives where failure carries enterprise-level consequences. These competitive non-negotiables determine whether a bank can launch products in weeks while competitors take months.
Competitive differentiation#
As one senior engineering manager reflected: “We’re building foundations that allow us to deliver bigger and better features faster that didn't even seem possible years ago.”
This compounds over time: each successful workflow makes the next one easier to build, creating accelerating returns that don’t show up in Year 1 ROI models but reshape what’s possible by Year 3.
Your next steps#
The full Forrester TEI™ study includes detailed financial models you can customize with your bank’s specific metrics:
- Your incident costs and frequency
- Your feature delivery timelines
- Your developer productivity baseline
- Your infrastructure and staffing costs
Every assumption is transparent, every calculation risk-adjusted, and every benefit traced to actual customer experiences.
Download the complete Forrester Total Economic Impact™ study to see the full methodology, detailed calculations, and interview insights.
Ready to see Temporal Cloud in action with your workflows? Schedule a technical discussion with our team.
The Total Economic Impact™ of Temporal Cloud is a commissioned study conducted by Forrester Consulting on behalf of Temporal, April 2025. Results are for a composite organization based on interviewed customers and will vary.