Backbase named Forrester leader & customer favourite

Backbase has been named a Leader in Forrester's Digital Banking Engagement Platforms assessment and was also identified as a Customer Favourite.

The research covered 11 vendors and evaluated their strategy, current offering, and customer feedback. According to Backbase, the review included its AI-native Banking OS, which is used by more than 120 financial institutions across retail, small business, and commercial banking, as well as private banking and wealth management.

Forrester highlighted Backbase's approach to unifying banking systems, citing what it described as a shared source of truth across the bank's technology estate. The assessment also pointed to specialised layers in the platform and its agentic AI features.

The recognition comes as Backbase argues that banks still rely on fragmented systems for much of their day-to-day work. It says a large share of frontline activity happens between existing applications, in handoffs, coordination tasks, and exceptions that no single system manages.

Backbase has positioned its AI-native Banking OS as a layer that sits above banks' existing core systems rather than replacing them. The software is designed to connect customer channels, front-office functions, and operational processes across areas such as payments, cards, risk, and customer relationship management.

Platform focus

Historically, Backbase concentrated on customer engagement software for banks. Its latest positioning broadens that scope to cover a wider set of customer-facing operations, aiming to coordinate work across staff, customers, and software agents.

The shift reflects a wider debate in banking technology over how lenders can apply AI tools without adding another layer of complexity to already fragmented environments. Banks often run large estates of legacy and specialist systems, making automation difficult when tasks cross departmental or application boundaries.

Forrester also singled out Backbase's Semantic Layer, called Nexus, as a competitive advantage. The report further noted that the company has one of the highest research-and-development-to-revenue ratios among the vendors evaluated.

The customer feedback element of the assessment appears to have been especially important to Backbase's result. The report said customers would choose the vendor again, citing trust in the company as well as the flexibility of the platform and its underlying architecture.

A separate passage in the report offered a more qualified view of where the product is best suited. "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," the report said.

Customer response

The Customer Favourite designation may carry particular weight in a market where banks often face long procurement cycles and place a premium on implementation track record. Digital banking platform projects typically touch multiple business lines and can take years to roll out, making references and customer satisfaction an important part of vendor selection.

Backbase says the Banking OS is now deployed at more than 120 institutions. The company is based in Amsterdam and was founded in 2003 by Jouk Pleiter.

Pleiter linked the ranking to the company's latest product strategy. "This is a proud moment and an honest one-especially being a customer favorite. This is the biggest recognition we could receive. It reflects the hard work our teams put in every day. 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," said Jouk Pleiter, chief executive officer and founder of Backbase.

The Forrester assessment adds an external benchmark to Backbase's effort to define a category around agentic banking, where AI systems take on more operational tasks across the bank's frontline. Whether that category gains broader traction will depend not only on product design, but also on whether banks can connect AI tools to the fragmented systems that still run much of their business.