Faced with changing customer expectations and mounting competition from new market entrants, banks are increasingly turning to digital banking engagement platforms (DBEPs) for new digital banking capabilities, rich and flexible digital front ends, and seamless employee experiences across touchpoints.

DBEPs are cross-channel banking solutions designed to enable integrated, comprehensive and superior experiences for both banking customers and staff members. These platforms allow banks to quickly engage with their customers across a broad set of channels, help them build a modern, agile, digital architecture, and support rapidly changing business requirements and models.

Banks can use DBEPs in a variety of scenarios, including as a pure, digital front-end platform, as a supplementary engagement layer, or as an enabler of digital banking transformation.

In a new report, research and advisory company Forrester looks at the rapidly evolving DBEP market, providing an overview of 38 different platforms and delving into their type of offering, geography and use case differentiation. The paper aims to help professionals understand the value they can expect from each vendor, how they differ from one another, and help financial institutions select the most relevant provider based on their size and market focus.

Lack of corporate banking use cases

According to the report, DBEPs now represent an established market with a growing number of vendors. Most of the players selected for the study cater well to retail banking, supporting use cases such as new retail banking customer onboarding, consumer products origination, consumer account management and improved digital customer service.

However, slightly more than half of the DBEPs in the report claim to support complex corporate onboarding journeys, and fewer than a third deliver experiences around use cases for cash and liquidity management, digital corporate credit facility, and trade finance.

CoCoNet is among those with the most comprehensive corporate and business banking offering, findings of the research show, supporting complex customer onboarding and providing cash and liquidity management capabilities in addition to digital corporate credit facility.

Trade finance, meanwhile, is one of the most scarce use cases, provided by only six of the companies studied, namely CR2, EdgeVerve, Finshape, NETinfo, Tagit and Temenos. Trade finance is followed by cash and liquidity management, with just seven companies providing the feature (Capital Banking Solutions, CoConet, EdgeVerve, FIS, ICS Financial Systems, Infocorp and Tagit), and digital corporate credit facility, which is offered by eight DBEP providers (Capital Banking Solutions, CoCoNet, Etronika, Finshape, Layer, Silverlake Axis, Tata Consultancy Services and Veripark).

Besides corporate and business banking, the research also looks at two other compelling use cases, namely embedded finance and ecosystem participation, as well as support for retail trading.

Only three providers (Comviva, Tata Consultancy Services and Ti&m) were found to offer retail trading capabilities, the report says, while, at the other end of the spectrum, embedded finance and ecosystem integration were found to be widely adopted by the sector, supported by 16 DBEPs.

Geographic focus

The study also looks at the geographic focus of each companies, revealing that most of the larger players with over US$175 million in product revenue are focusing on the North American region. These include Alkami Technology, FIS and Q2 Software.

Dutch banking technology company Backbase and Swiss enterprise software provider Temenos are the only two large DBEP firms with a considerable presence across multiple regions, including Europe, the Middle East and Asia-Pacific (APAC).

Medium-sized DBEPs with product revenue between US$20 million and US$175 million show more diversity, with some, including EdgeVerve, Intellect Design Arena, Oracle and Tata Consultancy Services covering APAC, while others including Veripark, Ti&m and and Sopra Banking Software are focusing on the European market among other regions.

Smaller players with product revenue between US$11 million and US$20 million are an even more disparate group. Platforms like Cobis Topaz, CoCoNet and CR2 focus on only one geography, while others, like Capital Banking Solutions, ebankIT and SAP Fioneer show significant revenue in three or more geographies.

Featured image credit: Edited from Freepik