Gartner's Market Guide: DBP's Role in Accelerating Digital Transformation

Growing in both size and complexity, the sector is attracting new entrants as well as established vendors expanding beyond digital multichannel solutions. In comparison to traditional offerings, DBPs’ modular approach enables banks to create and customise employee and customer digital journeys. Essentially, DBPs can give developers access to a wider array of composable digital banking capabilities, as well as provide access to a wider digital ecosystem, accelerate innovation, and increase AI deployment and open banking adoption.

By taking a modular approach, DBPs can satisfy bank demand for new capabilities faster and with less investment. According to Gartner, 80% of Tier 1, 2 and 3 banks will aim to compete on digital customer experiences through DBPs by 2028.

Our key takeaways from the report include:

– The breadth of banking specific channel capabilities is expanding, from account opening and customer onboarding to loan origination and AI-powered analytics;

– The ecosystem/marketplace play, where the DBPs provide partnerships or pre-integrations with other providers, is an important part of the offering; and

– Artificial intelligence (AI) is improving DBPs’ potential for productivity and product transformation.

The report states, leading bank CIOs and their buying teams are significantly changing the way they make DBP purchasing decisions. They are deprioritising prebuilt customer journeys from the DBP provider in favor of business capabilities provided by partner ecosystems, AI tools for productivity and product transformation, and tools that allow bank developers to create capabilities on their own.

These CIOs need a solution that has pre-built digital banking journeys, so they don’t waste time building features that are already commoditised, but also provides the freedom to build custom capabilities, such as real-time payments, digital lending or AI-driven insights, the way banks want. In this way, they can go to market much faster on what we consider to be table stakes, and focus on the customisations needed to differentiate themselves.

At Plumery, we help institutions take a progressive modernisation approach, which enables an incremental staged approach to change without introducing risks by doing too many things in one go.

Here are four reasons why banks should choose progressive modernisation:

– Lower risk: small, incremental updates minimise disruption;

– Faster return-on-investment: early wins deliver value quickly;

– Scalability: aligns with long-term growth and adaptability goals; and

– Customer-centric: delivers a frictionless experience by making changes invisible to customers.

In this way, banks can have standard journeys ready in weeks, and then create unique experiences on the same flexible platform with minimal effort. They can more easily connect to leading third-party providers and leverage new technologies.

Clearly, DBPs have an important role to play in the progressive modernisation of customer journeys to help banks meet the expectations of digitally savvy customers who are demanding seamless, real-time, and personalised banking experiences.

Gartner, Market Guide for Digital Banking Platforms, Chris Regan, Jeff Casey, 14 July 2025.

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