While Celent’s vision of Model Bank remains constant, much has changed over ten years. We look back at the history of Model Bank and its evolution, then provide an overview of Model Bank 2017: the nominations, the content themes, and, of course, the winners.

Model Bank is the main award that a financial institution (FI) can win from Celent. It is available to retail and commercial banks, credit unions, thrifts, and card issuers globally. The original vision of the Model Bank program was to try to answer a set of 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 technology projects?
• What can other banks learn from these initiatives?

While the vision remained the same, much has changed over 10 years. This report looks back at the history of Model Bank and how it has evolved. However, the main purpose of this report is to provide an overview of Model Bank 2017: the nominations, the content themes, and, of course, the winners.

Model Bank Programme Has Changed Significantly in 10 Years

Contrary to our approach in recent years, in 2017 we introduced specific named Model Bank awards with only a single winner for each award. Consequently, this report reviews the content themes dominant across all nominations, but has no detailed case studies. Instead, each case study is published as a separate report and available by clicking on the corresponding links from this page.

After long deliberations, the judging panel decided to recognize 21 initiatives as winners of the Model Bank 2017 awards, and they are listed in Table 1.

Table 1: Celent Model Bank 2017 Awards and Winners

In addition, we again recognize one financial institution as our Model Bank of the Year. We are pleased to announce CaixaBank, Spain as Celent Model Bank of the Year 2017.

“The record number of the highest quality submissions again this year is a testament to the pace of change in the banking industry,” says Zilvinas Bareisis, a senior analyst with Celent’s Banking practice and the author of the report. “Each of the 21 Model Bank award winners and Model Bank of the Year stood out from the crowd for their innovation, and the difficulty of the task at hand, and they demonstrable business benefits.”

This 30-page report contains 15 figures and two tables.