Backbase has been named a Leader and a Customer Favorite in The Forrester Wave Q2 2026. The evaluation assessed 11 vendors across strategy, current offering, and customer feedback.
This blog unpacks what that combination means: what Forrester evaluated, what the customer evidence shows, and why the architecture they recognized is the same foundation that makes AI-native banking work.
Why the category matters right now
The Forrester Wave evaluates the vendors building the operational layer between banks and their customers - the systems that coordinate digital channels, front-office work, and increasingly, agentic AI in banking. This is the category where the transition from digital experience to AI-native operations is being decided.
Banks deploying agentic AI need more than models. They need a digital banking platform with shared customer context, governed decision authority, and a coordinated execution layer across every system. That is what this evaluation measures - and why the result matters beyond the recognition itself.
What Forrester evaluated
Forrester assessed 11 vendors across two dimensions - strength of current offering and strength of forward strategy.
On strategy, Forrester recognized Backbase's vision of unification and shared truth across banking systems, and noted one of the highest R&D-to-revenue ratios in the evaluation. This is not a coincidence. Banks run on hundreds of fragmented systems. Roughly 50% of frontline work happens in the whitespace between them - the handoffs, coordination, and exceptions no single application owns.
That is precisely where AI agents break. Without shared context, clear authority, and a unified execution layer, AI only amplifies the fragmentation it was meant to solve. Building the architecture to fix that at the foundation level is expensive, slow, and invisible to anyone not doing it. The R&D ratio reflects that commitment.
On current offering, Forrester recognized the layers of the AI-native Banking OS working in concert - and singled out the Semantic Layer known as Nexus as a competitive advantage. Nexus gives every employee, AI agent and workflow a single shared view of the customer, updated in real time across every channel and system. The result is banking operations that run without reconciling data across systems, without agents operating on partial context, and without the manual coordination that currently consumes the majority of frontline work.
The evaluation recognized the AI-native Banking OS for its superior agentic AI capabilities. This matters because agentic banking is not a feature you add to a platform - it is a capability that requires the right foundation underneath it. Banks deploying agents on a fragmented architecture quickly discover that the models are not the problem.
Without the following three requirements in place, deploying agents does not reduce operational complexity, but compounds it:
- Without unified customer context agents act on incomplete information.
- Without governed decision authority agents create compliance exposure at scale.
- Without a coordinated execution layer agents add overhead instead of removing it.
What the Customer Favorite result means
The Customer Favorite designation is determined through independent reference calls that Backbase has no part in running. Forrester chooses who to contact and conducts every conversation without Backbase present. The result reflects what banks say when there is no obligation to say anything positive.
Using Forrester's own words: "Customers would enthusiastically select Backbase again, citing high trust and the platform's flexibility and foundational layers."
The banks that rated Backbase highest did not cite features or functionality first. They cited trust and foundational layers - which points to something more durable than satisfaction with a release cycle.
It points to banks that built on this architecture over time, saw what it compounded into, and would make the same decision again.
The bridge to AI-native
Banks have conquered digital engagement. The focus now is what happens when that engagement comes in and customers take action. That is what the AI-native Banking OS delivers - and it is the natural evolution of the architecture Forrester evaluated.
The AI-native Banking OS sits above a bank's existing systems - core, payments, cards, risk, and CRM - without replacing them. It coordinates execution across the full frontline: digital channels, front office, and operations. W
here Backbase historically focused on unifying the Customer Engagement layer, the Banking OS now extends that coordination across mid- and back-office operations - the domains where the largest cost-to-serve savings live and where AI agents can absorb the most work.
The four operational powers that make this work:
- Understand - Nexus assembles unified customer context in real time.
- Run - Orchestration executes workflows across employees, AI agents, and systems.
- Authorize - Sentinel governs every action with a verifiable Decision Token, no action executes without one.
- Optimize - the Intelligence Layer learns from every outcome and improves continuously.
Elastic Operations
The outcome of this architecture is Elastic Operations - the ability to scale throughput without scaling headcount linearly.
Banks running on this foundation are seeing 2-4x growth in product sales, 50-90% faster execution, and 30-40% cost-to-serve reduction. Every decision, by every actor, carries a full audit trail built into the execution layer - not bolted on after the fact.
Backbase is accelerating this through Agentic Servicing and Agentic Origination - extending the Banking OS into the operational domains where manual coordination is most expensive and AI agents can deliver the most value. Progressive transformation, not big-bang. One domain at a time with clear economic targets. Each deployment compounds on the last.
Banks that built on this foundation early are not starting the AI-native transition. They are already inside it.
Who this is for
Backbase is a strong fit for banks seeking a proven AI-native foundation, flexible off-the-shelf capabilities, and a platform built to compound value over time. It is not designed for banks unprepared to adopt an open, API-first architecture.
The AI-native Banking OS is built for banks that are ready to move domain by domain and build on a foundation that gets more powerful with every deployment.
The Forrester report is available by clicking here.
