Backbase Research

The data behind AI‑native banking.

Original studies and industry reports from the Backbase research team — measured, reproducible, and grounded in production data.

Publications

AI Visibility Index — US Banking

July 30, 2026

The Compressed Market

When AI assistants answer “what's the best bank?”, five brands collect seventy percent of the recommendations. Evidence from 6,881 answers across ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini: 82% of institutions are never mentioned once, all three assistants produce the same ranking, and the audited bank's own website accounts for 0.2% of citations.

70.2%

of brand mentions go to 5 institutions

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Industry survey — in partnership with African Banker

July 31, 2026

The State of AI in African Banking 2026

The reality of banking in the agentic era. Responses from 277 senior banking leaders across 37 African nations confirm a sector still committed to AI, yet increasingly insistent that it justify the capital being deployed against it — leaving one question the sector can no longer defer: ROI or no AI?

277

senior banking leaders · 37 countries

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Customer sentiment study — US banking

August 1, 2026

Shouting at the Machine

What 6,400 Trustpilot reviews (2023–2026) say about American banks in the age of AI service. Incumbents slid from 2.39★ to 2.11★ while complaints migrated from hold times to digital dead-ends — apps, lockouts and bots now surface in 38% of negative reviews. Meanwhile Revolut and Monzo climbed to 4.5★+ by resolving problems before support is ever needed.

38%

of negative reviews now cite digital-channel failures

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Peer-reviewed study · arXiv:2605.05482

July 21, 2026

FinRAG-12B: a production-validated recipe for grounded question answering in banking

A 12-billion-parameter model tuned on 143M tokens that outperforms GPT-4.1 on answer quality and citation grounding in banking QA — at 20–50× lower cost. Deployed across 40+ financial institutions with a +7.1pp lift in query resolution.

+7.1pp

production query resolution

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