Twenty-three years on the same problem

I started Backbase in Amsterdam in 2003 with the conviction that banking would be rebuilt around the customer rather than the account. Over 150 financial institutions now run their customer-facing operations on the platform, from credit unions to global banks.

The work has changed shape more than once. We began with omni-channel, unifying how a bank presents itself across mobile, web, branch and contact centre. That turned out to be a symptom of a deeper problem: an operating model organised around products and channels rather than customers. Agentic AI made that fragmentation impossible to ignore, which is what the AI-native Banking OS is for.

Before Backbase I co-founded Tridion, the Amsterdam content-management company that later became part of SDL, and before that Twinspark. I studied business administration at the University of Groningen.