Banco do Brasil wins 2026 Celent Model Bank of the Year Award

Banco do Brasil has been awarded Model Bank of the Year, Celent’s most prestigious award, at the annual Celent Model Bank Awards.
The bank is recognised for its exceptional implementation of AI and data analytics which are aligned with a sophisticated customer-centric strategy that drives sustainable growth and profitability.

Two initiatives, Escutaí and OdisseIA, exemplify the bank’s AI prowess and its ability to deliver differentiated customer experience alongside tangible operational agility. Notably, Banco do Brasil has also democratised access to AI and analytics—embedding AI capabilities into frontline tools and workflows. Employees—not just data scientists—can leverage advanced analytics in decision-making and customer engagement.

Celent subscribers can access the full length case study report for Banco do Brasil and all other award winners at Celent.com.

The annual Celent Model Bank awards seek to answer three simple but important questions.

• What would it look like for a bank to do everything right with today’s technology?
  
• What are some best practices and measurable business results of recent technology projects?
  
• What can other banks learn from these initiatives?
  

Over the years, Celent has published hundreds of detailed case studies for the program that answer these questions for initiatives spanning product innovation, banking ecosystems, customer experience, payments, and emerging technology. The program gives Celent an unparalleled insight into the state of the banking industry, its priorities, areas of innovation, and how both change from year to year.

2026 Celent Model Awards: 115 nominations

Michael Bernard, senior analyst, Celent said: “For 2026, Celent received 115 nominations from around the world with every region well represented. The program treats nominations from large and small institutions equally, and this year’s nominations were fairly well balanced across all asset tiers.

“At least two Celent analysts reviews every single nomination. Additional analysts are then brought in based on their area of expertise, so that any given nomination is scored by a minimum of three analysts, with at least one of them an expert in that area. Nominations that move on to a short list, then get reviewed and ranked again by the entire analyst panel.”

What does Celent look for?

The judging process evaluates each nomination on three criteria. What are the business benefits, both quantitative and qualitative? What is the degree of innovation, and how is technology or implementation excellence demonstrated? Those last two are subjective measures, so Celent takes care to give every single nomination a careful and fair consideration.

2026 winners recognise 11 institutions

This year, Celent recognised 11 institutions for demonstrating true excellence in technology, with three distinct themes emerging.

Zil Bareisis, Banking and Payments Director at Celent, said: “First, generative and agentic AI is powering significant and measurable gains in operational efficiency, transforming processes that once took days into actions completed within minutes, while reducing costs and error rates. And second, we see large scale modernisation and platform re architecture, especially with a focus on cloud native and API driven infrastructures. These are enabling organisations to scale faster, innovate more freely, and lay durable foundations for ongoing growth, and finally, at the centre of these technological advances are collaborative, human-centred approaches, cross-functional teams, client-driven design, and solutions that are multilingual and often jurisdiction aware within their region. Our 2026 model bank show us not just what’s possible, but what’s already being achieved when banks do everything right with today’s technology.”

Winner of the 2026 Celent Model Bank Award for Digital Asset Innovation: Kinexys by JPMorgan: JPM Coin

With the launch of JPM Coin, JPMorgan has become the first bank to issue a USD deposit token on a public blockchain and the first bank to bridge existing blockchain deposit accounts on a private permissioned blockchain to public blockchain deployment. As a result, it is bringing commercial bank money outside a closed-loop network to be used as a medium of exchange and settlement in the digital assets ecosystem.

JP Morgan identified an opportunity to provide a stablecoin alternative that offers several advantages:

• Superior risk and control through bank grade KYC/AML, secure access, and wallet allow listing
• Direct integration into the banking system via blockchain deposit accounts for deposits into JPM Coin and redemptions back to bank accounts
• Ability to pay interest

Alenka Grealish, senior analyst, Celent, said: “Kinexys by JP Morgan stands out for being the first bank issuer. There’s several firsts, not only as bank issuer, but also public blockchain, which is a huge breakthrough for a bank in this world where there’s a lot of non-banks vying to capture payments volume via digital assets, specifically tokenised money, such as stable coins.

“What JP Morgan realised is it has this huge customer base of institutional clients that really are seeking native cash settlement and near real-time payments. They saw an opening to deliver really a step change in their value proposition. JP Morgan developed JPM Coin, which can operate 24/7 with near real-time processing. That’s a big breakthrough in developing JPM Coin. The team identified an opportunity to provide a stable coin alternative that offers several advantages. JPM Coin is seamlessly integrated into JP Morgan bank accounts for deposits and redemption. What does this mean? It means that you can go from public blockchain rails to traditional rails seamlessly, which is really important to institutions.

JPMorgan changing the game when it comes to cash settlement, payments: Grealish

“It also can be used for collateral and for margin payments, another additional benefit, and because it’s public blockchain, it can improve on-chain liquidity management. Now, serving institutional clients isn’t always easy; they demand institutional-grade compliance and operational resiliency, a theme that’s recurring throughout our model banks and interoperability, and the same demonstrated that it can deliver across the board. For example, in terms of compliance, it developed a new advanced client onboarding workflow that includes wallet allow listing, so not just anyone can use JPM Coin. Critical to the team’s overarching success was managing a real complex, multi-disciplinary project with lots of moving parts. In the end, the team was able to galvanize and engender collaboration, another recurring theme. Throughout the process, they got a stellar view on what do clients need; not just leverage a new technology because it’s new and different, but how can it change the game? And JP Morgan is certainly changing the game when it comes to cash settlement and payments.”

Winner of the 2026 Celent Model Bank Award for Core Banking Innovation: KomerčníBanka: Product Innovation with Digital Core Modernisation

Komerční Banka (KB), a leading Czech bank which is part of Société Générale, moderniesd from a legacy mainframe system by deploying Temenos Core to create a new, fully digitalised platform. The bank successfully migrated over 1.3 million customers, and enabled by this new platform, KB developed a market-leading multi-currency account that has become a core part of its retail customer proposition. This digitalisation has allowed the bank to become customer-centric, driving stronger client acquisition, significantly higher digital sales, and improved net promoter scores.

Winner of the 2026 Celent Model Bank Award for Embedded Finance: JPMorgan: Embedded Finance Solution for Walmart Marketplace

Embedded finance is something that all banks should be well placed to offer. Yet it is usually the domain of smaller, so-called fintech banks. There are many reasons for this, but it is often because larger banks have a myriad of payment systems that make it hard, if not impossible, to expose and manage the right services. According to Celent, the development of J.P.Morgan’s Embedded Finance suite and the integration with Walmart’s marketplace Marketplace should be seen by the industry as a signal that embedded finance is as much a critical infrastructure layer.

Winner of the 2026 Celent Model Bank Award for Payments Innovation: Kotak Mahindra Bank: Cloud Native, Auto Scalable UPI Acquiring Stack

UPI, the Indian instant payments solution was a runaway success from day one and continues to grow rapidly – indeed, volumes rose by 56 billion in 2025 alone. Merchants & Payment Aggregators operate at the core of India’s digital payments ecosystem, relying on banks for acquiring rails (Cards and UPI) and escrow services.

Despite the segment’s rapid growth, it has historically been underserved due to structural complexity, technology intensity, and market concentration among a few large banks. That created both a challenge and an opportunity for the bank – how to win merchants and payment aggregators, but still deliver a seamless, scalable solution end to end where clients could be processing hundreds of millions of transactions To address this, the bank decided to embark on building a fully modernised, auto scalable cloud UPI acquiring stack, and encompass functionally across multiple parts of the bank to create an end to end seamless solution.

Winner of the 2026 Celent Model Bank Award for Cash Management: US Bank: Transforming the Treasury Management Portal

Corporate digital channels and platforms are central to banking services, offering operational improvements and enabling new services. Separating frontend digital channels from backend systems provides flexibility and consistency across client experiences.

SinglePoint is US Bank’s online treasury management platform serving more than 45,000 business clients and providing access to nearly 40 treasury and payment solutions. Through SinglePoint, clients manage payables, receivables, liquidity, fraud mitigation, international banking, and foreign exchange. In October 2025, US Bank rolled out the next generation of SinglePoint, a client-inspired, intuitive and efficient treasury management platform designed for businesses of all sizes. Celent’s award recognises the approach US Bank took to envision, design, build and deploy next-generation SinglePoint to commercial, corporate and business banking clients. Complicating the initiative, the program also had to accommodate the integration of clients and users from MUFG Union Bank that was acquired by US Bank in 2022. The result, notes Celent, is a modern experience built on an advanced technology architecture designed for future agility, that elevates the new SinglePoint among leading corporate digital platforms.

Winner of the 2026 Celent Model Bank Award for Corporate Customer Engagement: Wells Fargo: Enabling Personalised, Intelligent, and Scalable Digital Engagement

Wells Fargo has developed and implemented an enterprise engagement platform, enabling personalised, task-based client journeys across digital banking and relationship channels for corporate and commercial clients, and their relationship partners.

In 2025, Wells Fargo was winner of the Celent Model Bank Award for Step Change in Corporate Digital Banking with Wells Fargo Vantage, the bank’s next-generation digital banking platform.

In parallel to the Vantage banking platform initiative, Wells Fargo developed and launched a new engagement platform to elevate and scale its digital engagement and personalisation capabilities across Commercial and Corporate Banking. To be clear, this is not the digital banking platform, Vantage, but is a unified engagement platform capable of delivering personalised, intelligent journeys at scale.

Gareth Lodge, Principal Analyst, Payments at Celent said: “Like a growing number of retailers, Walmart decided to pivot towards a digital first strategy for the goal of its marketplace offering to become its primary growth engine. While this strategy was successful, it wasn’t without its challenges. The initial setup they had meant that sellers frequently had to deal with different third parties for different parts of the process, and therefore Walmart had little or no visibility.

For example, onboarding was a significant barrier with checks being done on a third-party platform. JP Morgan and Walmart had a long established relationship through conversations over the years. JP Morgan realised they could do something better, so in design partnership with Walmart, they generated and created an end-to-end integrated solution. There are many multiple features but the common element is the experience for the seller. For example, the onboarding process is now largely automated, and now only takes on average just a few minutes, rather before sometimes weeks.

“There is also a new wallet UI, which includes a dashboard, which allows a seller on the platform to manage all aspects of its account. Walmart Marketplace has been a roaring success. They’ve onboarded 1,000s of sellers in just a few months, enabled by this digital first account opening. This resulted in not only a better experience for the seller, but a faster time to revenue, both for Walmart and for the sellers on the platform. As a result, Walmart Marketplace has experienced double-digit year-on-year sales growth since its launch. Now, there are many benefits to the bank as well, not least a happy client, and that’s in part because of joint KPIs and objectives built into the build and process. It wasn’t just here’s a solution we bought; they designed it together and made sure there’s a joint success. It positions JP Morgan from just being a bank, to being a provider of critical infrastructure to its clients and enables its clients to do more business.”

Winner of the 2026 Celent Model Bank Award for Lending Innovation:The Loan Store: End-to-End Mortgage Automation with AI

The Loan Store, Inc. (TLS), the fourth largest wholesale mortgage lender in the US, became a technology and business pacesetter for lenders, building an automated mortgage fulfilment platform for their loan origination processes.

This initiative demonstrates the bank’s forward-thinking approach, adopting new document imaging, AI, and analytics technology and fully integrating it into the heart of their loan origination business. The bank transformed its middle- and back-office operations from a manual operation into an AI-automated system with human-in-the-loop controls.

TLS is using this advanced imaging, processing, and analytic system to accelerate employee effectiveness, speed up the process for customers, and to scale the lending process at lower origination cost per loan while increasing transaction volume. Celent recognises the bank’s accomplishments in business process transformation through machine learning, GenAI, agentic AI, and intelligent OCR technologies.

Winner of the 2026 Celent Model Bank Award for SME Customer Engagement: Absa: Transforming Customer Engagement with AI Agents

Absa Business Banking is moving toward AI-augmented relationship banking delivered at digital-first speed and scale. The bank deployed three financial services-specific Salesforce Agentforce AI agents, an African banking first, and reimagined SME customer onboarding by parallel processing, and transforming and actioning their client data for 360-view for operations, sales, and service. Operating across 12 African countries with embedded multi-jurisdictional compliance, the initiative demonstrates a replicable blueprint for deploying agentic AI at production scale in emerging markets.

Winner of the 2026 Celent Model Bank Award for Scaling AI: Huntington National Bank: Foundational Agents and a Capabilities-First Operating Model

Huntington National Bank solved critical scale problems by flipping the script on AI delivery, replacing one off use case builds with a multi-faceted strategy centred on foundational, reusable AI artifacts, and a capabilities-first operating model delivered through an agentic AI enterprise platform.

The bank established a dedicated Technology Innovation Group, which developed foundational reusable “building blocks” of AI capabilities, collaborated with Architecture, Cyber, and Risk teams to establish expedited review processes for AI solutions built on those capabilities, drove the adoption of AI-native mindset, and fostered AI fluency and democratisation.

Winner of the 2026 Celent Model Bank Award for Employee Enablement: Techcombank: An Agentic Development Platform for Accelerating Time-to-Market

In 2025, Vietnam’s Techcombank became a pacesetter for all banks globally, building an Agentic Development Platform for all aspects of their in-house development lifecycle. This initiative demonstrates the bank’s forward-thinking approach, adopting new technology and fully integrating it into the heart of its software development process. By transforming the DevOps process, the bank has turned software development from a manual, often siloed operation into a fluid, intelligent, and highly collaborative capability.

Techcombank has used advanced AI capability to accelerate employee effectiveness across their in-house dev ops work chain. Employee enablement is a critical skill for financial institutions today given the promise of Generative AI advancements. Celent recognises the bank’s accomplishments in leveraging agentic technology to rethink how they empower employees, while at the same time scaling AI securely and responsibly across the enterprise.

Full details as regards all 11 winning institutions and case studies for each Model Bank are available online at Celent.com