Backbase Leads AI Banking Wave, Earns Top Customer Praise

AMSTERDAM – April 28, 2026 – Independent global research firm Forrester has named Backbase a Leader in its latest report, The Forrester Wave™: Digital Banking Engagement Platforms, Q2 2026. The recognition places the Amsterdam-based company at the forefront of a competitive market, largely due to the strategic launch of its AI-native Banking OS, a platform designed to overhaul how financial institutions operate in an increasingly fragmented digital landscape.

In a rare dual honor, Backbase was also designated a 'Customer Favorite,' a title reflecting deep client trust and satisfaction. The comprehensive evaluation assessed 11 top vendors on their current offering, strategy, and customer feedback, underscoring the significance of this dual recognition in a crowded field. The report highlights a pivotal shift in the industry, where the ability to unify disparate systems and effectively leverage artificial intelligence is no longer a luxury but a critical component of survival and growth.

A New Operating System for the AI Era

At the heart of Forrester's assessment is Backbase's AI-native Banking OS, a new category of banking technology designed to tackle the industry's most persistent challenge: fragmentation. According to company estimates, roughly 80% of frontline work in banking occurs in the 'whitespace' between hundreds of siloed systems—the handoffs, manual coordination, and exceptions that no single application owns. This operational chaos is precisely where new AI initiatives often fail, as artificial intelligence can amplify the very fragmentation it is meant to solve without a unified foundation.

The AI-native Banking OS addresses this by functioning as a control plane that sits above a bank's existing infrastructure, including core banking, payments, cards, risk, and CRM systems, without requiring their costly replacement. This approach allows financial institutions to achieve what Backbase calls 'Elastic Operations'—the ability to scale their customer base, products, and services without a proportional increase in headcount or complexity.

The system is built on three specialized layers:

• The Intelligence Layer: This component proactively scans for critical signals related to risk, revenue, and potential customer churn, aiming to identify issues weeks before they become apparent to human teams.
• The Semantic Layer (Nexus): Cited by Forrester as a key competitive advantage, Nexus creates a single, shared, and continuously updated customer record across all systems. This ensures every employee, workflow, and AI agent operates from the same consistent context, eliminating data conflicts.
• The Authority Layer (Sentinel): Designed to ensure AI is trustworthy and compliant, Sentinel governs what every user—human or AI—is permitted to do. It checks every action against bank policy in real-time and logs all activities for auditability, supporting compliance with emerging regulations like the EU AI Act.

Forrester's report lauded this vision of unification and praised the platform's 'superior agentic AI capabilities,' positioning it as a foundational technology for banks preparing for the next wave of AI-driven transformation.

More Than a Leader: A 'Customer Favorite'

The 'Customer Favorite' designation from Forrester offers a compelling narrative beyond technological prowess. It signals a deep-seated trust between Backbase and its more than 120 clients across 50 countries. According to the report, “Customers would enthusiastically select Backbase again, citing high trust and the platform’s flexibility and foundational layers.”

This sentiment is backed by tangible results. A major UK wealth manager, for instance, successfully deprecated 20 legacy onboarding modules by launching a unified platform, creating a 'living wealth dashboard' for its clients. In Australia, a new bank focused on small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) built its entire mobile application in just over a year by leveraging the platform's composable architecture. Similarly, a leading Vietnamese bank developed its business banking app in only six months by reusing proven journeys from its retail banking platform, showcasing the system's extensibility.

This high level of customer satisfaction is directly linked to the company’s significant investment in innovation. Forrester noted that Backbase maintains one of the highest R&D-to-revenue ratios among the evaluated vendors, a commitment that translates into a continuously evolving platform that meets the future needs of its clients. The flexibility praised by customers allows banks to modernize at their own pace, delivering innovative digital solutions without disrupting their core operations.

Unifying the Frontline: A Strategic Necessity

The recognition arrives as the banking industry grapples with a paradigm shift. Customer expectations have moved beyond simple digital transactions to demand for hyper-personalized advice and services. Simultaneously, the rise of 'Agentic AI'—semi- or fully autonomous AI systems capable of executing complex, multi-step tasks—is forcing banks to rethink their entire operating model.

Backbase's unified approach is positioned as a strategic imperative for navigating this new era. By providing the shared context and governance layer that agentic AI requires to function reliably and safely, the platform enables banks to automate complex workflows in areas like loan origination, fraud detection, and compliance. This allows human teams to focus on higher-value, relationship-driven work.

Jouk Pleiter, CEO and Founder at Backbase, framed this evolution in the context of the report. "This is a proud moment and an honest one - especially being a customer favorite," he stated. "This is the foundation we move from as we set our sights on the future - as we just launched the AI-native Banking OS as the new operating system in the era of Agentic Banking."

Forrester's analysis suggests the platform is an ideal fit for institutions ready to embrace a forward-thinking, API-first architecture. The report notes, “Backbase is a good fit for banks seeking a platform with state-of-the-art tech, useful off-the-shelf capabilities, CX tools, and a foundation for future initiatives, but not for those unprepared to use its open architecture and API-first approach.”

Positioning in a Crowded Field

While Backbase secured a top spot, the Forrester Wave evaluation makes it clear that the digital banking platform market is dynamic and highly competitive. The report identified Temenos as another Leader, recognizing it for its robust out-of-the-box solutions, superior channel support, and strong localization capabilities. The contrast highlights that while both companies lead the pack, they offer different strategic paths to modernization.

Where some competitors focus on providing comprehensive, prebuilt offerings, Backbase's strategy is centered on enabling banks to build and innovate on a unified, AI-native foundation. This distinction caters to financial institutions that see their technological architecture not just as a cost center, but as the primary engine for future growth and competitive differentiation in an industry being fundamentally reshaped by intelligence.