Celent, the leading research, advisory and consulting firm focussed on technology for financial institutions globally, has announced its 2025 Model Bank winners.

The 2025 Model Bank programme attracted 140 nominations from around the world. Every region was well represented with the nominations well balanced across all asset tiers. Of the 18 winning banks, six are headquartered in the US and three in Canada. India and the UK each have two winners with institutions from the Philippines, Chile, Brazil, Vietnam and Romania also recognised.

A common theme across all categories is the winning banks success in combining technology, talent, and processes to modernise platforms, enhance customer value, and lead with impact.

From leveraging advanced tech to embracing Generative AI alongside human expertise, these institutions are setting new standards in efficiency, product innovation, and service delivery.

JP Morgan – Winner 2025 Celent Model Bank of the year

JP Morgan Payments launched several concurrent initiatives that markedly improved its end-to-end payments and treasury services, driving business value for corporate clients and ecosystem partners.

Specifically, the bank is recognised for the success of four initiatives, namely:

Payments Development Portal: a strategic digital platform to connect developers with JPM’s payments infrastructure.

Integrated Solutions Plugin: an embedded banking solution integrating popular middle-market resource planning systems.

API Multibank Reporting: a reporting product that recognises multibank reporting by using the API connectivity channel to retrieve information from non-JPM accounts.

Cash Flow Intelligence: an AI-driven analytics and cash forecasting solution providing visibility into clients’ cash flows.

Celent has released an interview with JPMorgan’s Lisa Davis, Managing Director, Head of Digital and Design Commercialization, for a deeper dive into the initiative and the team behind its success. And Celent subscribers can access the full length case study report on Celent.com.

Previous winners: Celent Model Bank of the year

2025 marks the third time that a global US-headquartered bank is recognised as the model bank of the year. Bank of America was the winner of the primary Celent award in 2018 with Citi winning in 2019. Other recent winners include 2013 BBVA Compass; 2014 Commercial Bank of Africa; 2015 Fidor Bank; 2016 Boston-headquartered lender, Eastern Bank; 2017 CaixaBank; 2020 Royal Bank of Canada; 2021 Varo; 2022 Teachers Federal Credit Union and 2023 ICICI Bank.

The 17 Celent Model Banks of 2025 (in alphabetical order)

Aditya Birla Capital: Award for Excellence in Generative AI

The award citation recognises Aditya Birla Capital as being in the vanguard and excelling in three critical areas: implementing emerging technology at scale, effectively ideating and collaborating, and realizing the “R” in ROI. Celent has released a highlight reel of the initiative, along with a one-page overview. In addition, it has published a full-length case study report for each of the model banks recognised that is available for Celent’s subscribers on Celent.com

Banco do Brasil: Award for AI Innovation in Small Business

Banco do Brasil’s launch of ARI (Área de Recomendações Inteligentes) is notable for two reasons. Firstly, this is one of the few customer-facing GenAI projects in production in the industry. Secondly, it addresses a key pain point for small business customers, namely how to get clear and timely advice to help them better run their companies.

A highlight reel of Banco do Brasil’s initiative, along with a one-page overview, is available at Celent.com.

BancoEstado: Award for Core Banking Modernisation

BancoEstado, the largest bank in Chile by customer base, has demonstrated successfully that it is possible for a large bank to move off a mainframe-based legacy core banking system to next-gen core platforms.

The bank adopted a phased migration approach, shifting 14 million customers over a few years to Mambu, a next-generation, cloud-native digital core, running both platforms in a parallel without impacting the customer, a massive undertaking. The project is close to completion, with BancoEstado seeing strong cost and innovation speed benefits. A highlight reel summarising the BancoEstado initiative is available via this link.

Bank of America: Award for the Edge in Actionable Analytics

Celent selected Bank of America’s CashPro Data Intelligence for this year’s Model Bank Award for developing an Edge in Actionable Analytics. The bank has demonstrated a commitment to engage with its corporate client community and develop self-service, rich data and analytics tools that help all corporate clients meet their working capital and operational goals. A highlight reel summarising the Bank of America initiative is available via this link.

Bank of Montreal: Award for Payments Innovation

BMO is recognised for six recent initiatives spanning the entire client lifecycle, from sales and onboarding to servicing and support. The six initiatives address specific client pain-points around payments and were executed with care and attention, and collectively merit recognition. A highlight reel summarising the BMO case study is available via this link.

Citi: Award for Corporate Integration

Citi launched a new unified API and integration experience, Citi Developer Portal, delivering innovation across client experience, operational efficiency, and business impact, earning the bank the 2025 Celent Model Bank Award for Corporate Integration. According to Celent, Citi’s Developer Portal initiative highlights the importance of adopting a client-first approach, designing solutions based on how clients experience Citi as a single entity, rather than developing within traditional product silos.

It also demonstrates the bank’s commitment to delivering a world class developer experience while helping clients accelerate time-to-value with scalable, more secure, and user-friendly integration options. By combining self-service design, embedded certificate provisioning, pre-built integrations, and a solution-oriented marketplace, the portal sets a high standard for enterprise API platforms in the financial industry and demonstrates a clear understanding of client pain points. A highlight reel summarising the initiative is available via this link.

Citizens Bank: Award for Technical Onboarding Excellence

The bank’s MTF platform was approaching end of life, along with its underlying software and infrastructure. Its age was causing many challenges, not least that the platform was failing to meet the bank’s functional, business, customer, resilience, and security needs. There was also a recognition that the bank would also need to prepare for widespread ISO 20022 adoption.

The customer onboarding and file testing processes were a major pain point. They were inefficient and time-consuming, and reliant on excessive back-and-forth communication, creating lengthy, frustrating customer experiences.

Citizens Bank implemented a robust, next-generation, cloud-based business integration platform from SEEBURGER that was flexible, scalable, secure, and resilient as well as provided traditional secure file transfer capabilities.

A highlight reel summarising the initiative is available via this link.

First Hawaiian Bank: Award for AI-augmented Retail Lending

The bank increased loan growth and improved operating efficiency by expanding addressable markets in consumer lending through the implementation of AI-based, automated underwriting. A custom credit model–coupled with process redesign to maximise its impact–improved customer experience, expanded approvals in previously unscorable/credit invisible populations, and improved risk management.

A highlights reel summarising the initiative is available via this link.

ICICI Bank: Award for AI-augmented Business Lending

The bank has evolved its lending to actively use data and ML decisioning models across all stages of the small and medium-sized enterprise (SME) customer lifecycle, such as customer acquisition, credit underwriting, cross-sell, upsell, and portfolio risk management. Data is taken directly from the verified source by leveraging digital public infrastructure instead of from customers. This has brought operational efficiency in addition to increased predictive lift from machine learning models. The highlights reel is available via this link.

Nationwide Building Society: Award for Payments Transformation

Nationwide’s existing Faster Payments infrastructure was, complex, and heavily integrated with various payment channels and processing systems. Rather than just upgrading its technology, Nationwide set an ambition to go further, embracing next-generation payments and reinventing customer experiences at speed and scale. Nationwide chose to modernise its payment processing infrastructure by shifting to a cloud-native, event-driven architecture. The highlights reel summarising the initiative is available via this link.

Royal Bank of Canada: Award for Reinventing Cash Management with RBC Clear

The RBC Clear initiative is a new market entry in the US cash management market that required not just a new client experience, but a completely new technology stack.

RBC acknowledged that this vision would require a new technology stack, free from outdated legacy systems. By designing with today’s technology, the bank could reimagine process flows to meet client desires, rather than being constrained by legacy product and application architecture, and increase its speed of delivery.

The citation recognises the bank’s success in bringing a bold vision to life: entering a new market with a next-generation technology platform. The results not only meet client needs, but also lower the bank’s cost of funding. A highlights reel summarising the initiative is available via this link.

Salt Bank: Award for Digital Bank Launch

The award recognises Salt Bank’s success in rapidly launching a new digital bank as well as the wider implications its approach has for the industry. Salt Bank is a new mobile-first digital bank that launched in Romania in 2024, with the development of the bank platform and organisation built in under 12 months. To achieve this, Salt Bank was one of the first banks to leverage Engine by Starling, a next-generation cloud and microservices-based banking platform that enables it to provide functional richness, a strong customer experience, and innovative services. The highlights reel is available via this link.

TD Bank: Award for Customer Centred Innovation in Business Banking

Celent recognises TD’s Small Business Dashboard and Tap to Pay on iPhone as representing exceptional discovery of distinct customer needs and innovation. The bank leveraged consumer-digital technologies to deliver truly impactful solutions for small business clients. Partnerships with proven third party solution providers combined to form a complimentary offering producing strong results. The bank took a customer-centric approach to product design that included extensive research to identify specific pain points experienced by its small business clients. In addition, the bank pursued an early-adoptor position in the area of payments technology, where it knew it would have difficulty playing catch up later. The highlights reel is available via this link.

The Co-operative Bank: Award for Open Banking

UK-headquartered Coop Bank launched Go Get Paid, a facility offering invoicing, payments, and accounting functionality to small businesses. Celent reports that it is notable for two reasons. Firstly, the service is available to all small businesses in the UK (including customers of other banks), which has helped to support customer acquisition. Secondly, the proposition takes advantage of open banking payment initiation APIs at the core of the service, demonstrating the value of this functionality to support product innovation. The highlights reel is available via this link.

Union Bank of the Philippines: Award for Embedded Finance

The bank teamed up with Samsung to launch The Samsung Finance+ initiative, the bank’s first entry into the point of sale lending market. The partners developed an instant gadget loan programme with a fully digital customer experience. Customers can purchase Samsung gadgets with 0% interest loans, even without a credit card, making technology more accessible to a broader audience, including those new-to-credit. The solution represents a win-win for end customers, Samsung and its dealers, and the bank. To assess the credit worthiness of new-to-credit customers, the bank had to develop a different approach, leveraging alternative data, its own models, and specialist partner solutions aimed at elevating the loan payments to the top of the customer’s payments hierarchy. By partnering with Infosys Finacle, the bank was able to demonstrate technology readiness and agility, a crucial factor in winning the competitive bid for UnionBank to become the financing partner of Samsung Finance+ in the Philippines. The highlights reel is available via this link.

Techcombank: Award for Operational Excellence

Techcombank’s enterprise-wide robotic process automation (RPA) initiative, exemplifies a strategic transformation in Vietnam’s digital banking sector. Launched in 2022, the initiative aimed to enhance efficiency, reduce costs, and improve customer experience by automating high-volume, repetitive tasks across 11 divisions, including finance, risk management, and customer services. Partnering with Akabot, Techcombank implemented a scalable automation framework, achieving 95–99% automation rates by 2024 and cumulatively saving 586,000 working hours.

The program’s success was driven by three pillars: process re-engineering, change management, and a dedicated automation centre of excellence. The highlights reel is available via this link.

Wells Fargo: Award for Step Change in Corporate Digital Banking

Wells Fargo Vantage, the bank’s next-generation digital banking platform, is recognised for delivering a dynamic, persona-driven experience tailored to business clients’ unique needs, including industry, size, operational context, and lifecycle. As a result, Vantage can support companies that range from start-ups to multinationals with complex workflows—all in one platform. The project was highly complex and involved integrating 65 fragmented systems with a modular, scalable framework using advanced technologies like micro-frontends, APIs, AI/machine learning, and GraphQL. Celent recognises the bank’s success in delivering across all the critical dimensions of digital banking transformation: acting on the voice of the customer and selecting and implementing the most effective advanced technologies. The highlights reel is available via this link.