Backbase appoints Roland Booijen as Chief Product Officer, Agentic Banking

Amsterdam, 30 September 2026 - Backbase announced today that it has appointed Roland Booijen to Chief Product Officer, Agentic Banking. Booijen will lead the Agentic Banking product strategy across Conversational Banking, Relationship Intelligence, and Customer Operations.

The appointment comes five months after Backbase launched its AI-native Banking OS and follows the recent acquisition of Kasisto, a pioneer in conversational and agentic AI for banking.

Backbase’s AI-Native Banking OS is the operating system that banks use to run their frontline operations where employees and AI agents work together across the customer lifecycle, from front-office to back-office. In the new role, Booijen will set the roadmap for those agents, which take action and resolve everyday banking requests end to end, freeing relationship managers to focus on clients. He continues to report to Jouk Pleiter, Backbase's founder and CEO, as key player of the executive team steering the company's shift from digital banking software to an AI-native operating system that banks use to unify their frontline.

Booijen has spent more than a decade in banking technology product leadership, most recently as Backbase’s General Manager for Ecosystems, where he led Backbase’s Marketplace and Connector product, technology & commercial strategy. Booijen is also the Founder of the widely popular Dutch Payment App, Tikkie, and has held various director roles at ABN AMRO before joining Backbase.

This appointment lands as banks move AI from isolated pilots toward enterprise investment and executive-level priorities. Salesforce reports that the adoption of AI agents in customer service organizations increased 1.7x from 2025 to 2026 and that 70% of customer service organizations that adopt AI agents observe measurable value within 60 days of deployment.

"Roland has spent years building the products that took us from digital banking to agentic banking. Giving him this mandate now, reflects our dedication to lead the charge in this space. He's the right person to take our agents to the frontline to serve millions of people around the world."

Jouk Pleiter, Founder and CEO at Backbase

"The next generation of bank users won't know a branch, and they won't type an account number into a five-step form. They'll talk to their bank the way they talk to Claude or ChatGPT, and expect outcomes. And inside the bank, employees will work hand in hand with agents to deliver them. It's an honor to have a role at a company that's actively shaping that future."

Roland Booijen, Chief Product Officer, Agentic Banking at Backbase