Member Spotlight — Backbase: Supercharging your banking engine, owning the customer experience
Backbase is the creator of the industry's leading AI-powered banking platform. Building on our heritage as the original Engagement Banking Platform, we empower financial institutions to orchestrate hyper-personalised customer journeys across every touchpoint. From our Sydney office and across Australia, New Zealand, and the Pacific, we partner with a diverse range of the region's financial institutions to help them accelerate their digital transformation. Our platform is designed to sit on top of any core banking system, allowing institutions to unify fragmented technology and deliver AI-powered outcomes across the entire customer lifecycle: from attracting and acquiring the right customers, to proactively expanding the relationship and ensuring lifelong retention.
Our mission is to help our clients move beyond simple digital transactions and start building true one-to-one relationships at scale. We believe the future of banking is not about replacing the core, but about owning the experience.
What prompted the inception of Backbase?
Backbase was founded on a simple observation over two decades ago: banks were struggling to keep pace with the digital world. While the internet was creating seamless experiences everywhere else, banking remained a frustrating maze of siloed products and inconsistent channels. Each time a bank launched a new digital service, they would build a standalone solution, creating a nightmare of technical debt and a disjointed customer experience.
Our founder, Jouk Pleiter, saw this "inside-out" approach was fundamentally broken. The inception of Backbase was driven by an "outside-in" philosophy: a single platform putting the customer at the centre. The vision was to create a presentation layer over any core system, unifying data to orchestrate a single, seamless customer journey, regardless of underlying complexity. That vision of a decoupled, customer-centric architecture drives us to this day.
The challenge: Moving beyond the digital façade
The banking sector across Australia and New Zealand is at a critical inflection point. The first wave of digital transformation is over; having a mobile app is now table stakes. The new challenge is moving beyond a simple "digital façade" to deliver truly intelligent, AI-powered banking.
Years of targeted digital investment have often created more complexity, not less. We see institutions running multiple digital platforms for different products, struggling to get a single view of their customers. Furthermore, with ongoing industry consolidation, many institutions face the immense task of integrating disparate technology stacks. This fragmentation is the single biggest barrier to leveraging AI, starving machine learning models of the unified data they need. The key challenge we help solve is how to overcome this complexity without resorting to a high-risk, multi-year core replacement project.
Our mission: from legacy core to AI-powered leader
Our growth is driven by a single mission: to empower every financial institution to become an AI-powered, customer-centric leader. We do this by providing the platform that orchestrates intelligence across the entire customer lifecycle, on top of the trusted systems they have today.
A sporting analogy for a digital age
We often explain our approach with a sporting analogy that resonates deeply in this region. Many banks operate on a trusted, stable 'chassis' - their proven core system. Our platform is like a modern, AI-powered engine. Instead of asking you to scrap your beloved classic, we give you the ability to upgrade the engine, allowing you to compete with modern challengers on speed and performance while retaining the stability you trust.
Unifying the foundation for AI
Effective AI starts with clean, unified data. Our platform acts as the bank's central nervous system, creating a single customer view by connecting to a complex mix of modern and legacy core systems - from large global providers to regional specialists and in-house platforms - alongside CRMs and third-party fintechs. This provides the essential data foundation needed to power effective machine learning models.
Orchestrating the intelligent customer journey
Once the foundation is in place, our platform allows banks to design and deploy AI-powered journeys at speed across the entire lifecycle:
Attract: Use AI-powered market insights to identify and reach the right prospective customers with hyper-relevant messaging that speaks directly to their needs.
Acquire: Automate onboarding with intelligent, AI-driven document verification and instant decisioning, creating a frictionless first impression.
Expand: Use predictive models to identify customer life moments, proactively offering the right advice and products to deepen the relationship.
Retain: Identify at-risk customers through behavioural analysis and trigger personalised, proactive outreach to build lasting loyalty.
De-risking transformation & merger integration
For a sector undergoing significant consolidation, our platform offers a powerful way to solve the jarring 'day two' problem. Instead of forcing one set of members onto an unfamiliar digital platform post-merger, Backbase acts as a unified experience layer across both legacy institutions. This provides a consistent digital service for all members from day one, while the complex work of consolidating core systems happens in the background.
Looking ahead: The future is composable & intelligent
Keeping our platform at the cutting edge while ensuring it remains open and flexible has pushed us to embrace a composable, API-first architecture - what we see as the future of banking.
Our focus is centred on three key areas:
Deepening our AI capabilities: We are continuously investing in our platform's AI capabilities, exploring how generative AI can transform everything from customer service to product development.
Expanding our partner ecosystem: We are committed to strengthening integrations with all types of core banking vendors, from global platforms to regional specialists. We are also expanding our marketplace of pre-integrated fintechs for capabilities like ID verification, fraud detection, and CRM to simplify a best-of-breed approach for our clients.
Championing the composable enterprise: We believe the future is not monolithic. Banks must be free to assemble a "best-of-breed" technology stack. Our goal is to be the undisputed leader in a composable world - the central platform orchestrating any core system, fintech, or third-party service into a single, intelligent customer experience.
Learn more about how we're helping banks in the region at: backbase.com
