Backbase

La semana pasada en Miami, durante Fintech Americas, decidimos crear un espacio diferente: un almuerzo privado con líderes de la banca latinoamericana para intercambiar visiones sobre la hoja de ruta de nuestra industria para los próximos trimestres. ¿La conclusión principal tras regresar del evento? El debate ya no es sobre la tecnología por sí misma, sino sobre su capacidad para orquestar modelos de negocio más humanos y eficientes. Durante el encuentro, validamos que los pilares de personalización y agilidad que proyectamos en nuestro Reporte de Predicciones 2026 (https://lnkd.in/eEpVaGnM) son, precisamente, las prioridades que hoy definen la agenda de innovación en la región. Gracias nuevamente a los líderes que nos acompañaron por su apertura para construir, junto a nosotros, una visión más clara para el futuro de la banca. 

As banks integrate AI across their operations, many are missing a more fundamental shift: from extracting value from the customer to exchanging value with them. Extracting value is selling as many products as possible. Exchanging value is recognizing the customer's actual problem and matching the right product to the right life decision - getting kids to university, buying a house, or retiring with enough. Banking veteran Dharmesh Mistry makes this distinction in the latest Banking Reinvented episode, and it reframes what banks should actually be asking AI to do. If the goal is still product push, AI becomes a faster version of the same old model. If the goal is to recognize problems and exchange value, AI becomes something far more powerful - a system that understands full customer context, sees across the operation, and acts at the right moment. That's what agentic AI actually enables, but it can only get there with shared context across the whole bank - not just the slice of a process it's been dropped into. Listen to the latest Banking Reinvented episode to hear Dharmesh's take on what the shift from extracting to exchanging value really requires - and why it changes everything about how banks should deploy AI. 🎧 [Link to episode in the comments].

T.J. Steele has spent years doing what most banks only talk about. SVP and Digital Channel Solutions Director at Eastern Bank, T.J. takes the stage at ENGAGE Americas to walk through a real multi-year transformation - digital onboarding rebuilt from the ground up, customer and employee experiences unified across every channel. What worked, what didn't, and what he'd do differently next time. He'll cover why journey orchestration beats chasing niche features, how Eastern Bank held onto its community bank identity while modernizing the foundation underneath, and what it actually takes to unify the frontline across every touchpoint. If you're working through your own roadmap, this is the session to be in the room for. More to come as we count down the days to Engage. See the full agenda at https://lnkd.in/en6PcWQm --- April 21 - 23, 2026 · Nashville, Tennessee

Onboarding is where the honeymoon ends. A client signs, expectations are high, but weeks pass before they can do anything. The good news? Almost all of that friction is structural, and banks are already fixing it with AI. Clients submit unstructured documents, the KYB system doesn't talk to the core platform, and entitlements get configured through manual back-office tickets one request at a time. The good news for commercial banks is AI applied to the right two touch points cuts weeks off the cycle. The two most impactful use cases are document ingestion and entitlements setup. Both are live at commercial banks today, have measurable outcomes, and depend on one architectural shift that most banks haven't made yet. Visit the blog in the comments section to learn more about what that shift looks like and how to sequence it.

ENGAGE Americas hits Nashville in less than a month, and the speaker lineup is starting to take shape. April 22-23, we bring together executives from banks leading the charge on AI - and our first speaker announcement sets the tone perfectly. Christine Martin, Head of Treasury Management at EverBank, joins the commercial banking panel. She'll be on stage with Arun Ramamoorthy, exploring what the next chapter of commercial banking looks like in practice - Agentic onboarding, predictive cash management, and what all of it means for digital portals and the RM relationship. More announcements coming soon. Nashville | April 22-23 Full agenda: https://lnkd.in/en6PcWQm #BackbaseENGAGE #CommercialBanking

It's easy to say "move fast, experiment, fail forward." But in a heavily regulated institution like banks, the guardrails aren't optional. How to move fast without gutting the compliance, risk, and governance frameworks? Wessel Oosthuizen from Deloitte Africa has a clear answer to banks: Start with a wedge. Replace giant transformations with a disciplined start with one or two use cases. Go front to back inside a single business unit. Reimagine how that unit works - not as a pilot or as a side project, but as the new operating reality, then expand. The pressure to show AI progress everywhere at once is real. But spreading thin doesn't build anything. The banks trying to boil the ocean? They're stalling. The banks picking a wedge and going deep are the ones building the muscle that scales, and they can deploy it to one journey at a time. Listen to the latest episode of ‘Banking Reinvented’ to hear what Wessel thinks about AI transformation inside regulated institutions - and what leaders need to do differently.

There's a specific kind of silence that happens when a room full of bankers hear something they've always recognized but have never heard named. That's what happened last week at 11:FS After Dark, when our CMO Tim Rutten took the stage and put a number on something the industry has been challenged with for years. Roughly half of all frontline banking work lives in the whitespace between systems - not inside them. Invisible to dashboards and expensive to run, this work scales linearly with every new customer and every new regulation. For decades, banks accepted fragmentation as the cost of doing business. In the age of AI, that cost becomes a ceiling. Last week, Backbase introduced a new category in banking technology: the Unified Frontline. An operating model where customers, employees, and AI agents share the same context and operate under the same governance. Controlled by the AI-Native Banking OS, it is the system that runs, understands, and governs the entire frontline. Our founder and CEO Jouk Pleiter will reveal what the Banking OS looks like in full on April 22nd at Engage Americas in Nashville. Stay tuned.

The ENGAGE Americas 2026 agenda is live. Two days of main stage sessions, success stories, and hands-on workshops - built around what it actually takes to move AI projects in banking forward. April 21 - 23, 2026 | Nashville, Tennessee View the agenda - https://lnkd.in/en6PcWQm

CFOs want ROI projections and formal governance before approving AI budgets. The banks clearing that bar pick specific, high-friction processes and fix them. Here are the top three: - Onboarding workflows carrying $175M a year in KYB and KYC overhead - RMs spending 70-75% of their time on admin instead of client dialogue - Commercial clients who want predictive cash flow tools and will move to a fintech to get them Arun Ramamoorthy from Backbase and Vincent Ford from EverBank walked through each one in our latest webinar, demonstrating real use cases, real outcomes, and practical guidance for commercial banking leaders ready to move past pilots. [Link to the full blog summarizing the main takeaways in the comments section.]

What's next for cash management? That's the conversation happening this week at the McKinsey & Company Cash Management Forum. Backbase helps commercial banks do more with the relationships they already have. Meet our team - Kristin Robertson, Mac Chiles and Hari Raghunathan from March 23 to 25 at Half Moon Bay, California.