Backbase hires dual CTOs for agentic, digital banking

AI-native banking operating system Backbase today appointed Greg Fahy chief technology officer for digital banking and Deepak Pandey CTO for agentic banking. The new roles come as more of the fintech’s banking clients “run the two side by side, with separate budgets and often separate vendors,” Pandey told FinAi News . “Customers now use AI every day and they expect their bank to act on a request as quickly as an [AI] assistant answers a question." — Deepak Pandey, CTO for agentic banking, Backbase "That has made agentic banking the biggest shift on a bank's agenda," he said. Some 71% of banks are expected to have AI agents in production for cloud operations by the end of 2026, up from 28% in late 2025, according to a May report by tech company Amdocs . Bifurcating the digital and agentic banking positions is advantageous because “each business is big enough to need a CTO's full attention and each asks different things of its engineers,” Pandey said. [caption id="attachment_57390688" align="alignright" width="300"] Deepak Pandey[/caption] “Digital banking runs the channels that more than 100 banks use every day,” he said. “Its engineering is about scale — moving banks off old systems and keeping millions of customers online without interruption.” Agentic banking adds a newer discipline centered on how agents decide to handle each request, Pandey said. “Customers find new ways to ask for things and model providers update their models on their own schedule,” he said. “Either one can change how an agent behaves overnight, without anyone touching our code.” The divisions also require different expertise, including platform engineers for digital, AI engineers who tune and evaluate agents and “forward-deployed engineers who work inside banks to put agents on their real processes,” he said. The largest shared investment for both units is Backbase’s core operating system, with its digital and agentic tools using the same connectivity layer, Pandey said. “The controls are shared, too,” he said. “An agent that acts for a customer can do only what the bank's policies allow that customer to do, whichever app the customer uses.” Goals Pandey joined Backbase in 2014 and was most recently vice president of technology, according to LinkedIn . Pandey said his priorities over the next six months include driving adoption of Backbase’s new conversational AI agent . More than 10 banks have deployed the tool, with one South African bank boosting its self-service containment rate from 20% to 70%, he added. Secondly, the Dutch company wants agents to execute more processes end to end, handling disputes or card replacements from the customer's first message to the final booking in the core system, Pandey said. [caption id="attachment_57390689" align="alignright" width="300"] Greg Fahy[/caption] He said Backbase also plans to build more small-language models trained for specific banking tasks because “a small model does one narrow job well, runs faster and costs much less than a large general model.” Fahy joined the company in 2018 and most recently served as CTO for services. He will primarily focus on Backbase’s Delivery Factory, an AI-powered software development platform designed to accelerate digital implementations, according to the fintech’s release today. With CTOs for both agentic and digital banking, “neither business waits on the other's priorities,” Pandey said. Register here for early-bird pricing for the FinAi Banking Summit, taking place March 1-2 in Denver. View the full event agenda here .

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Backbase hires dual CTOs for agentic, digital banking

Fintech appointed Greg Fahy, Deepak Pandey

Banks on the hook for agents’ actions, OCC says

SoftBank denies problems meeting AI infrastructure payments

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