ABN Amro’s digital intrapreneur joins Backbase to lead banking- as-a-platform business

Backbase, the Engagement Banking category leader, announced the arrival of Roland Booijen, adding seasoned talent at a time of major growth in the business. Booijen, former Digital Channels & Innovation Director of ABN AMRO, will build out Backbase’s banking-as-a-platform offering. He also successfully launched the Tikkie peer-to-peer payments app, which currently boasts over 7 million Dutch users.

Backbase is in the middle of significant recent growth, surpassing 150 clients and $100 million in ARR in 2021. Leading the paradigm shift to engagement banking – by helping banks move from a channel-first to a customer-first approach – has driven significant growth, creating demand for top technology and sales leadership. With ambitions to create banking apps that serve more than 10% of the world population, CEO and founder Jouk Pleiter is bolstering the leadership team to accelerate growth.

Booijen was most recently the Digital Channels & Innovation Director for ABN AMRO. With his teams, he helped accelerate ABN AMRO’s digital transformation with increased autonomy and insight for clients. During his tenure there, he launched the Tikkie payments app which is used by 7 million, or roughly half of all Dutch adults. In addition to Tikkie, Roland also founded the bank’s personal financial management app, Grip. As the largest Dutch PFM app, Grip was also the first to open itself for other banking clients, working on PSD2.

The success of ABN AMRO’s mobile channels in its digital transformation and launching ventures as Tikkie and Grip as an intrapreneur shows the vision and execution Roland can bring to Backbase. Our Engagement Banking Platform is the clear category leader, and now we’re going to double down on building our ecosystem of fintech and technology partners. The ecosystem is core to our vision of enabling customers to build a customer-first bank with a full suite of capabilities from day one.

_{Jouk Pleiter
CEO and Founder at Backbase}

As General Manager, Ecosystems, Booijen will build out the banking-as-a-platform vision on top of the Backbase Engagement Banking Platform. His team will develop new value propositions and integrations with leading fintechs and Backbase’s lean core partners that combine to create value for new and existing clients.

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