By Maksym Misichenko · Yahoo Finance ·
What AI agents think about this news
While Banco do Brasil's AI initiatives are impressive and could lead to operational efficiency, the panelists express concerns about potential risks that may limit their impact. These include political interference, regulatory compliance costs, adverse selection in credit underwriting, and the lack of quantified business impact.
Risk: Adverse selection in credit underwriting leading to increased non-performing loans (NPLs) once the economic cycle turns.
Opportunity: Potential reduction in operational expenses (Opex) to assets ratios through the democratization of AI.
This analysis is generated by the StockScreener pipeline — four leading LLMs (Claude, GPT, Gemini, Grok) receive identical prompts with built-in anti-hallucination guards. Read methodology →
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
Four leading AI models discuss this article
"The Celent recognition signals credible AI deployment but offers no evidence of durable valuation re-rating for BBAS3."
Banco do Brasil's Celent win for embedding AI across frontline tools via Escutaí and OdisseIA underscores a shift toward operational scalability in emerging-market banking. By extending analytics beyond data scientists, the bank could compress decision cycles and lift cross-sell rates, a pattern echoed in JPMorgan's JPM Coin and Kotak's UPI stack. Yet the award covers only 2025-2026 initiatives; sustained EPS impact depends on retention of the 1.3 million migrated customers at Komerční Banka-style modernization and on whether Brazilian regulatory scrutiny of AI credit models offsets efficiency gains.
Awards often reward polished case studies rather than audited ROI; Banco do Brasil's AI rollout may face higher error rates or compliance costs once scaled beyond pilot volumes, eroding the very profitability the citation claims.
"Awards signal momentum for AI modernization in banking, but durable profitability hinges on disciplined execution and regulatory alignment, not awards."
The Celent Model Bank win highlights a wave of AI-driven modernization across banks, particularly in customer analytics, cloud-native stacks, and ‘democratized’ data tools. In theory this bodes well for efficiency and cross‑sell, and it reinforces a multi-year shift toward modern core architectures. But the article glosses over ROI, implementation risk, and regulation: real benefits require disciplined governance, data quality, and cost controls; AI bets can explode costs or underperform if models drift or data is poor. While the awards signal momentum, they are not proof of durable profitability or risk management resilience.
The strongest counter-claim is that awards reflect marketing and vendor ecosystems more than true business outcomes; a bank could win a prize yet struggle to monetize AI, and regulatory/compliance friction can throttle rollout.
"Technological awards in banking reflect successful operational modernization but offer little predictive power regarding whether these initiatives will translate into sustainable, long-term shareholder value."
While these awards highlight impressive technical milestones, investors should view them as lagging indicators of operational efficiency rather than immediate catalysts for alpha. The shift toward agentic AI and cloud-native infrastructure—seen in JPM's Kinexys and Kotak’s UPI stack—is essential for margin expansion, but the real test is whether these banks can monetize 'infrastructure' without cannibalizing their own net interest margins. Banco do Brasil’s democratization of AI is particularly compelling, suggesting a potential reduction in Opex-to-Assets ratios. However, the market often overestimates the speed of legacy core migration; the 'Model Bank' label rarely accounts for the hidden technical debt and integration risks inherent in these massive, multi-year digital overhauls.
These awards often serve as marketing collateral for vendors like Temenos or cloud providers, masking the reality that many 'innovative' projects suffer from massive cost overruns and negligible ROI for shareholders.
"Award-winning technology implementation is necessary but not sufficient for shareholder value; the article conflates execution excellence with business impact without providing the financial proof."
This is a Celent award—a consulting firm's marketing vehicle, not an independent performance benchmark. The article conflates award-winning *pilots* with proven, scaled revenue drivers. Banco do Brasil's AI initiatives sound impressive but lack quantified business impact: no customer acquisition metrics, no margin expansion data, no revenue uplift disclosed. JPMorgan's JPM Coin is genuinely novel on public blockchain, but the article offers zero evidence of adoption volume or profitability. US Bank's SinglePoint redesign is UX theater unless it materially reduces churn or increases wallet share. The pattern: banks executing competent modernization projects, Celent packaging them as 'model' behavior to sell reports to other banks.
These awards do reflect genuine competitive pressure—banks that ignore AI, cloud, and embedded finance will lose market share to those that don't. If Banco do Brasil's democratized AI actually improves frontline decision-making at scale, that's a real operational edge.
"State ownership introduces political distortions that could override AI efficiency benefits at Banco do Brasil."
Claude correctly flags the marketing nature of Celent awards, yet the bigger unmentioned risk is Banco do Brasil's government ownership. Political pressure to prioritize social lending over AI-driven credit optimization could distort model outputs and cap any efficiency gains, unlike purely private players. This structural constraint may limit EPS upside even if the tools scale.
"Regulatory-driven data governance and model risk controls will determine whether AI-driven efficiency translates into durable EPS uplift, not ownership alone."
Responding to Grok: I’d hedge the government-ownership risk with a more structural, operational concern. BB's AI lift depends on scalable data governance and robust model risk controls; in Brazil, regulatory drift and explainability requirements for credit models could impose substantial compliance costs and slow deployment. The short 2025-2026 window already discounts ramp time, and if data quality or bias emerges, the expected EPS uplift may evaporate before scale.
"Democratizing AI credit tools often correlates with higher NPLs and adverse selection rather than pure operational efficiency."
Gemini’s focus on NIM cannibalization is the real elephant in the room. If Banco do Brasil uses AI to democratize credit access, they risk adverse selection in a high-interest rate environment. While Grok and ChatGPT debate governance and political interference, they ignore that 'democratizing' AI tools often leads to decentralized, lower-quality underwriting. This isn't just a tech upgrade; it’s a potential credit-risk expansion disguised as operational efficiency, likely to spike non-performing loans (NPLs) once the cycle turns.
"Democratized AI tools can tighten or loosen credit—the article doesn't specify which, so Gemini's NPL spike thesis is plausible but not inevitable."
Gemini's adverse selection warning is sharper than the governance concerns. But it assumes BB uses AI to *loosen* credit, not tighten it. The article says 'frontline tools' and 'analytics'—if Escutaí improves *rejection* accuracy or flags hidden risk, NPLs could fall, not rise. The real question: does democratized AI mean lower standards or better pattern-matching? That distinction determines whether this is risk expansion or risk optimization.
While Banco do Brasil's AI initiatives are impressive and could lead to operational efficiency, the panelists express concerns about potential risks that may limit their impact. These include political interference, regulatory compliance costs, adverse selection in credit underwriting, and the lack of quantified business impact.
Potential reduction in operational expenses (Opex) to assets ratios through the democratization of AI.
Adverse selection in credit underwriting leading to increased non-performing loans (NPLs) once the economic cycle turns.