To compete for customers and grow profitably, banks need the ability to adjust as much and as fast as required at any given moment. Leading digital banking engagement platforms (DBEPs) make that possible.
My new report, The Forrester Wave™: Digital Banking Engagement Platforms, Q2 2026, reveals insights about the current AI and technology landscape in banking. DBEPs remain vital to banking providers: As one bank exec told us, “The two biggest checks any bank writes are to their core provider and to their digital engagement vendor. These platforms are mission-critical for us.” Here are three takeaways from our research:
DBEPs still matter a lot — it’s how they matter that’s shifting. It can be tempting to think that the emergence of new AI capabilities and interfaces is rendering digital engagement platforms obsolete. But the evidence from our research points in the opposite direction: For at least the foreseeable future, these platforms will be essential to banks for gaining or maintaining a competitive advantage in the AI era. It’s how these platforms are being deployed — and how they impact a bank’s business growth — that matters. Rather than being primarily a way to provide a set of prebuilt offerings, products, and experiences to end users, leading DBEPs enable banks and third-party partners to explore new ideas and build new stuff rapidly. For example, Q2’s platform includes a toolkit that helps developers test and measure new products.
Who these platforms are built for is changing — quickly and dramatically. DBEPs are increasingly being built for and used by banks to connect to a widening array of systems and tools, both within and outside the bank. DBEPs’ main audience is changing, too: Platform vendors have ramped up their no-code and low-code capabilities (while maintaining pro-code solution for certain key areas). Leading DBEPs use emerging technologies like better generative AI models to enhance their low-code offerings. For example, Backbase offers an agent studio that provides a low-code tool for building new agentic workflows.
Everyone wants to be API-first and AI-native — but this can be illusive or even deceptive. APIs play a crucial role in digital ecosystems. Virtually every DBEP vendor we evaluated either already positions its platform as “API-first” or puts APIs at the center of its near-term strategy. But there’s a problem: As a digital leader at one bank put it, “sometimes the APIs don’t actually work — or the integration isn’t nearly as easy as advertised.” New AI capabilities pose a similar danger: Every vendor makes claims about their AI offerings, but there are major gaps in how AI is actually applied. Infosys Finacle offers an example of a good approach: Its platform uses proprietary genAI capabilities to offer useful conversational interfaces for multiple parts of the end-user lifecycle (e.g., acquisition, onboarding, and everyday interactions).
If you’re a Forrester client, I urge you to check out the full Wave evaluation here (you can also check out our recent landscape report showing a wider set of DBEP vendors). You can also set up a guidance session to discuss how you can build your own strategy on a page.
If you’re not a client, reach out to us!
