Backbase unveils Intelligence Fabric to unlock AI-productivity gains for banks

• The expansion of the Engagement Banking Platform includes a powerful set of natively embedded data/AI capabilities.

• Agentic AI will allow banks to unlock productivity gains across all their critical customer servicing and sales operations.
• High priority capabilities include Conversational Banking, Customer Lifetime Orchestration, Advanced Financial Insights, and AI-Augmented Customer Support.
• The Intelligence Fabric will leverage Backbase’s Grand Central Integration Platform-as-a-Service to unify data from diverse sources in a bank’s tech ecosystem.

Amsterdam, 25 September 2024 - Backbase is excited to announce a major expansion of the Engagement Banking Platform with the introduction of the Intelligence Fabric layer, a powerful set of data and AI infrastructure and development capabilities that are now natively embedded in the platform. This groundbreaking launch is set to redefine how banks can harness the power of data and AI to unlock significant productivity gains within their business-critical customer servicing and sales operations.

AI is already playing a pivotal role in transforming banking, driving efficiency, improving risk management, and orchestrating contextual, relevant customer experiences. As the AI super-cycle continues to reshape the financial landscape, Backbase is rising to meet these challenges head-on with the introduction of the Intelligence Fabric.

Introducing Agentic AI for banking

With the new Intelligence Fabric, Backbase will enable banks to implement Agentic AI capabilities that unlock massive productivity gains across all their critical service and sales operations. Using advanced reasoning and grounded in cross‑bank data through the Backbase platform, banks can now create AI Agents that augment and orchestrate customer journeys in tandem with underlying workflows, integrations, and real-time data interpretation.

Gartner® predicts that by 2028, one third of interactions with GenAI services will invoke action models and autonomous agents for task completion. With unified, real-time access to bank-wide data, knowledge, tools, and workflows on the Engagement Banking Platform, Backbase AI Agents can understand and interpret contextual information to provide personalized responses. They can also execute action plans, from handling small tasks like transaction search or bill payment scheduling to managing entire processes such as customer onboarding. Ultimately, the AI Agents have the potential to reinvent customer journeys and workflows across the bank. Built-in guardrails will provide robust oversight, allowing banks to implement strict levels of compliance and governance.

Jouk Pleiter, Founder and CEO at Backbase, commented,“Backbase is leading the way with its AI platform capabilities for banking. The introduction of the Intelligence Fabric marks a pivotal moment in our mission to empower banks to harness the power of data and AI at scale. Today, we are making a massive leap forward in unveiling our Agentic AI strategy. We see a future where AI Agents will work autonomously in the background, handling tasks, managing processes, and collaborating with customers and employees. The adoption and evolution of these new-gen, super-powerful agents will dramatically reduce internal and external labor spend on overheads such as sales, marketing, customer service, and compliance operations.”

Leveraging data connectivity with Grand Central integration platform

The Intelligence Fabric leverages Backbase’s Grand Central — the world’s first Integration Platform-as-a-Service for banking — which seamlessly unifies data from diverse sources, including core banking systems, payment gateways, fintech capabilities, and non-fintech systems like CRMs. This robust integration platform provides a single source of truth for banks, consolidating data from all these sources. Additionally, this enhancement allows for democratized data, making it accessible to not only Backbase, but also banks, their partners, and vendors.

AI-driven customer engagement orchestration

Backbase is prioritizing the availability of AI-Agent capabilities for the following use cases:

1. Conversational Banking: leverage large language models (LLMs) to handle daily banking tasks like accessing accounts, making payments, checking transaction histories, and managing cards across digital channels.
2. Customer Lifetime Orchestration: create AI-driven product activation and up-sell campaigns that enable the bank to increase the product holding per customer. AI-driven predictive nudges will provide contextual guidance to customers, promoting relevant new products such as credit cards, loans, savings, investing, and insurance, all based on customer behavior and financial history.
3. Advanced Financial Insights: harness AI and machine learning models to analyze customer data and behavior, providing actionable insights such as early warning indicators for retail customers, cash-flow forecasting for SMBs, and customer health and viability information for relationship managers.
4. AI-Augmented Customer Support: deploy cutting-edge Generative AI models to power customer-facing chatbots that provide safe, accurate, and instant responses, drastically reducing support ticket volume. On the agent side, deploy AI capabilities that analyze customer sentiment, summarize issues, and suggest reply options, equipping support teams with the insights they need to craft personalized, effective responses and enhance the overall service experience.

Thomas Fuss, Chief Technology Officer at Backbase, added: “Our Intelligence Fabric is a game-changer for the banking industry. With native AI capabilities embedded directly inside the Backbase platform, we now provide banks with the infrastructure and developer tooling to seamlessly combine data from various sources, create event-driven systems, and adopt or build AI-agents for specific tasks. Banks will remain in full control of their data and can define and monitor all the guardrails to ensure the AI is working within the compliance requirements set by the bank and the regulators.”

For more information on how the Intelligence Fabric can transform your bank’s operations, visit the website.