11 Jun, 2026
Financial institutions know what they want from their digital banking platforms: experiences that reflect their brands, serve their account holders, and move at the speed of change.
The challenge, though, is in the execution: Keeping pace with expectations, standing out in crowded markets, and managing back-office complexity. The Q2 Digital Banking Platform is built to accelerate execution.
Our vision is simple: less time waiting, more time building. At CONNECT 26, Q2 customers and leaders shared how far that vision has come and where it’s going. The evolving platform spans three interconnected layers: the experiences account holders have, the operations teams manage, and the introduction of embedded AI to optimize.
Experiences that belong to your institution, built on your timeline
The most visible layer of Q2's digital banking platform is the one account holders interact with every day. It’s the front door to your digital brand, and now you can control it.
Advanced Theming
Capabilities have expanded significantly. Advanced theming, for example, now gives teams direct control over their brands with fonts, button styles, input fields, colors, and layout. Light, dark, and high-contrast mode support is coming later this year.
It’s all entirely self-service, accessible exactly when you need it, for differentiated experiences that set your brand apart.
Aesthetic Templates
Aesthetic templates inspired by contemporary design trends—including flat and modern styles, popular neobrutalism and minimalist designs, and even glass and blur effects made familiar by iOS and Android—are available in Experience Builder with a few simple clicks. Soon, custom animated loading experiences, already built for more than 50 institutions, will be accessible to all institutions directly through Experience Builder.
Personal Experiences
Personalization is powered by Q2 SMART. SMART now connects audience data across the platform—to the Composable Dashboard editor, Q2 Discover, and Q2 Innovation Studio partners. This empowers institutions to deliver experiences relevant to people throughout their life journeys, without manually moving data between systems.
"We're thinking about this in two ways. We're asking how we can give financial institutions the ability to control the digital experience without limitations, and how to weave in personalization and audience guides to make it the most meaningful experience possible," said Q2 Director of Product Management Clayton Reichelderfer.
The power in practice: A+ Federal Credit Union
A+ Federal Credit Union (A+) is experiencing the measurable benefits of powerful personalization tools and control over the experiences it delivers.
A+ serves a diverse membership, with varied needs, across channels ranging from digital banking to physical branches inside high schools. A 16-year-old student opening a first account has vastly different needs and expectations than a 40-something single mother of three. But demands for an easy, helpful, and modern banking app are universal.
"First, we wanted to create a more modern look and feel because we were getting app store reviews saying, 'your app is outdated,’" says A+ AVP of Digital Experience Mikalena Stephens.
"The other piece was bringing in personalization, the capability to provide a personalized experience to all our members. To cater to 16-year-olds and 40-plus members, who are both typically using our mobile app, we needed to create a more personalized experience for all. And those experiences should be completely different."
Control over build and delivery
As an early adopter of Composable Dashboard, Stephens described a build process that looked nothing like traditional vendor models. Marketing team members and SDK developers all worked simultaneously and on different timelines. Each had different operational control and considerations.
"While my marketing team was working in SMART, my SDK developers were creating our custom modules, and I was in Experience Builder building it all out, demoing in real time, saying 'let's move this and that.' And we did it all without any back-and-forth that could delay our launch."
Managing the member transition was as deliberate as the build itself. A+ used Q2 Discover to preview the new experience before launch, providing guided tours on first login and placing a feedback link directly on the dashboard instead of waiting for app store reviews to reveal frustrations.
"With Q2 Discover, we knew exactly who that user was," Stephens said. "We were able to reach out and say, 'We understand this might be a shock, but let's walk you through this together.' Those technical problems that came up, we were instantly able to resolve. We attribute that success to the Q2 Discover product."
The results: five-star reviews, a best mobile solution award, and membership that is 81% mobile. "Now, it's a great experience," Stephens said. "No more comments about that modern experience. We hit the mark.”
The operating platform behind the experience
The experience layer is only as powerful as the tools behind it. Q2's platform gives banks and credit unions centralized control over configuration, management, and scale through four interconnected tools:
- Experience Builder
- SMART
- Discover
- Console
The goal, Reichelderfer explained, is to eliminate the operational friction that has historically made managing a digital banking channel more complex than it needs to be.
"We want to give you keys to the kingdom," he said. "This is a fast-moving SaaS environment. We want to get out of your way. We don't want you to have to contact support, go through long projects, or pay more for a lot of these engagements. We want to provide a great front-end experience that's powerful, meaningful, and easy to configure on your own."
That means institutions of any size—a team of one at a community credit union or a large digital operations group at a regional bank—can configure, update, and manage experiences without relying on external support or lengthy project timelines. As soon as a change is made, it applies in real time. Q2’s platform moves at the speed of the institution, not the other way around.
AI that works where your teams work
A critical layer of Q2's digital banking platform is also the fastest-moving: artificial intelligence embedded directly into the tools your teams already use.
At CONNECT 26, we announced the release of Q2 Assistant, the AI-powered companion built into Q2 solutions, starting with Q2 Console. Inside Q2 Console, Q2 Assistant supports the customer care and operational work financial institutions’ back-office teams perform every day.
Meet your back-office assistant
Because most AI tools exist outside your workflow, you open a new tab, step outside the systems where banking actually happens, and try to bridge the gap yourself. But banking doesn't happen in a chat window. It happens here: Q2 Assistant offers a powerful new way to work.
Q2 Vice President of Product Management Corey Gross, who leads Q2's AI strategy, describes it in three modes:
Inform
Ask a question about a customer, a transaction, or a policy and get a clear, confident answer in seconds. The Customer 360 use case is illustrative: Instead of navigating across multiple Console tabs to assemble a complete customer profile before a service call, a team member simply asks Q2 Assistant.
Guide
This is step-by-step coaching through complex Console workflows. For new employees, edge cases, or high-stakes processes like diagnosing a failed batch transaction, Q2 Assistant walks team members through exactly what to do, without requiring them to memorize every step.
Act
Through agentic execution, Q2 Assistant completes tasks on behalf of the user. Resetting a locked-out user's credentials, which once required multiple screens and manual steps, now happens in seconds with a simple prompt.
The efficiency gains Q2 is delivering with early design partners are significant. "We're seeing time to resolution improve anywhere from 6x to 700x," Gross said. "That improved time to resolution translates to more capacity. You're freeing people up to do more high-value strategic work like spending their time with customers and building relationships. That delivers an overall better, more differentiated experience for the institution."
Built in, not bolted on
What distinguishes Q2 Assistant from general-purpose AI tools is contextual awareness. Q2 built new API infrastructure from the ground up—not to layer an LLM on top of Console but to ensure Q2 Assistant observes what is on screen to work as a true side-by-side companion inside the product.
"You can trust that its suggestions are based on the knowledge contained within your institution and the knowledge of how these workflows operate end to end," Gross said. "It's not about putting an LLM on top of it. It's about making sure it's an essential part of your everyday work life."
The expansion is underway.
Experience Builder. An AI agent will soon be able to ingest a brand book, map its variables to Q2's theming system, and apply the rebrand through a simple conversational interface, compressing hours into minutes.
SMART. AI will power more intelligent audience creation, campaign measurement, and downstream targeting.
Looking further ahead, Q2 Assistant is becoming the orchestration layer for an entire ecosystem of agents built by Q2, by financial institutions, and by third-party Innovation Studio partners—all operating within Q2's security and compliance guardrails.
“Agents are discrete AI workers,” Gross explains. “You give them a job, and they use tools and skills to get it done. Q2 Assistant is the interaction layer, the way humans interact with agents, and how we ensure their safe operation within our ecosystem."
The through line
Control over the experience, control over the operations, and intelligence that scales and optimizes. These are three layers of one platform designed to work together and grow with the institutions that use it.
"Branding, experience, configuration, operations, how you engage and understand your account holders, you now have control over it all,” said Jaime Dominguez, Q2 principal product marketer. “You're not waiting, you're building. You're not reacting, you're adapting in real time. And with AI, you're scaling your teams, improving decisions, adding capacity without complexity.”
The Q2 Digital Banking Platform of today and tomorrow gives you the tools and control to build and deliver the experiences you want and own. For financial institutions ready to own your digital experience, on your terms, your platform is here.