Backbase today announced that Everest Group has named it a Luminary, the top category, in the Everest Group Innovation Watch: Agentic AI in Banking 2026 report.
The research assessed Backbase's AI-native Banking OS against 22 other vendors globally based on market adoption, use cases in production, partnerships, and investments.
Banks may download a complimentary copy of the report here.
According to Everest Group, agentic AI is expected to play a critical role in driving efficiency, compliance, and growth across retail, corporate, SME, and wealth banking. Banks face legacy systems that resist change and regulations that keep tightening. Competitors move fast, and customers expect more from every interaction. Agentic AI now sits at the center of how banks respond.
These agents are already running in production. At BMO, for example, Backbase Conversational AI resolves up to 81% of inbound customer requests without human intervention. Similarly, BSF has seen onboarding rates quadruple, allowing customers to open accounts and use cards instantly, without a single manual touchpoint.
Breaking down the barriers to scale
Agentic AI is gaining traction in banking, but Everest Group notes that fragmented systems, manual exceptions, data constraints, and regulatory complexity still limit adoption.
Backbase’s AI-native Banking OS, released in 2026, directly addresses these critical operational challenges, shifting the paradigm from isolated AI copilots to governed workflow orchestration.
The Everest Group report identifies three capability areas within Backbase’s offering:
- Shared context and intelligence: Backbase consolidates customer, account, transaction, document, and decision context across connected banking systems to give AI agents and employees a shared operational view for real-time decision support.
- Agentic workflow execution: AI agents support judgment-heavy tasks, including evidence gathering, document analysis, KYC and affordability checks, and exception routing. These workflows operate within defined guardrails.
- AI Factory: Allows banks to shape and ship workflows, agents, connectors, and policies. The environment supports configuration, testing, deployment, simulation, and monitoring across the agent lifecycle.
Production-ready use cases
The report details five Backbase use cases that solve real-world banking bottlenecks across several key domains:
- Customer operations: Supports KYC, KYB, due diligence, service requests, document pulling, risk pre-classification, judgment flagging, and SLA tracking.
- Disputes operations: Pulls evidence, classifies disputes by type and risk, and prepares dispute files, and supports employee review and decisioning.
- Payments operations: Detects failed payments, reconciliation breaks, compliance holds, and processing anomalies, then classifies and routes them to the appropriate teams.
- Lending operations: Gathers documents, verifies data against source systems, builds credit summaries, and supports underwriter review and decisioning.
- Risk and fraud operations: Detects anomalies and assembles transaction history, entity relationships, and evidence for investigator review.
The June 2026 acquisition of Kasisto further strengthened this offering, integrating its banking-focused agentic AI platform, financial services intelligence, and team into Backbase’s AI-native Banking OS.
Executive perspectives
"Every bank has run an AI pilot. Very few have figured out how to scale one," said Jouk Pleiter, CEO and Founder of Backbase. "The real gap is accountability in production: who has authority to act, what gets executed, and what the bank can prove after the fact. BMO and BSF are proof this works at scale, not in a sandbox. Being named a Luminary confirms what our customers already know. We're building the system of record for how banks run on AI."
Kriti Gupta, Vice President at Everest Group, commented on the significance of this shift: “As banks move beyond isolated AI pilots, the focus is shifting toward embedding agentic AI into banking workflows where it can operate with the context, controls, and human oversight required in a regulated environment. Backbase is addressing this shift by bringing together customer and operational context, workflow orchestration, and governed AI execution across areas such as onboarding, servicing, payments, disputes, lending, and risk operations. Its acquisition of Kasisto further strengthens this proposition by adding banking-specific conversational and agentic AI capabilities to its AI-native Banking OS. The combination of banking domain depth, a growing set of production-oriented use cases, and continued ecosystem investments positions Backbase as Luminaries on Innovation Watch: Agentic AI in Banking 2026 research.”
Everest Group does not endorse any company, product, or service included in its research. It does not advise selection based on the assessment.
RSVP for the webinar: From Pilot to Agentic ROI
On October 28, Backbase will host an executive briefing featuring the Everest Group sharing its findings from the report. The session will cover how banks are moving agentic AI from pilot to production, phased rollout methodologies, vendor evaluation criteria, and what the leading banks are doing differently.
