Sopra Steria Stakes Its Claim As A Digital Banking Thought Leader

Opportunity

Sopra Steria saw an opportunity to establish itself as a trusted authority in the banking space by building a suite of content and tools that would help incumbent banks compete in a digital-first landscape.

How Forrester Helped

Since 2021, Sopra Steria has worked with Forrester to field surveys and build its Digital Banking Experience (DBX) initiative — a robust suite of tools including yearly reports, a digital maturity assessment, and data dashboards that enable banks to gauge their digital maturity, become more competitive, and prepare for the future.

Business Impact

The DBX has been a valuable account-based marketing and retention tool for the company, along with helping generate new opportunities worth several hundreds of thousands of euros each year. Additionally, it has generated high-profile media coverage that has helped cement the company’s standing as a digital banking thought leader in Europe

Forrester helped Mercier refine his team’s vision. “I went to Forrester with a lot of ideas,” he recalls. The Forrester team “was incredible in helping me build the project and define how we would convert this idea into something highly relevant.”

Forrester worked with Mercier’s team to develop a survey of 40 questions geared toward helping banks evaluate their future readiness in digital banking. In June 2021, Forrester Consulting fielded its first survey on behalf of Sopra Steria to decision-makers at nearly 1,000 banks. To add richness and nuance to the survey findings, Forrester also interviewed decision-makers at organizations that partner with banks. These robust insights informed Sopra Steria’s first annual Digital Banking Experience (DBX) report, which also introduced a digital banking readiness scoring framework that categorized banks in areas including strategy, culture, process, and technology.

That initial work laid a foundation for continued collaboration that has deepened and expanded. The DBX has evolved from a report to a multifaceted initiative, key components of which include:

• Innovative thought leadership content. Since the 2021 report, Sopra Steria has worked with Forrester Consulting to field surveys and produce additional reports on top-of-mind topics including AI, open finance, and consumer trust. In 2022, the surveys expanded to include 12,000 banking customers from 14 countries worldwide, along with banking decision-makers. The reports created from the survey data have fueled additional content, including whitepapers and session content for the annual Sopra Banking Summit event.
• A digital banking maturity assessment tool. Sopra Steria and Forrester combined their data and expertise to build a model through which incumbent banks could rate themselves on five different maturity levels. Sopra Steria uses this assessment tool in part for lead generation, providing several of the questions on the website followed by a form to access the full assessment. It also has become instrumental in Sopra Steria’s account-based marketing efforts. “If we’re having a discussion with a key account, we can extract data that is related to them,” says Mercier. “They love that level of insight.”
• A data dashboard. In 2022, Forrester created a data visualization dashboard for the Sopra Steria team using software from Tableau, which is expanded each year with the latest survey data. Banking customers can use the dashboard upon request, and it’s been an invaluable tool for the company’s internal teams. “It’s pure knowledge for us,” says Mercier. “That knowledge helps drive our marketing, our sales, and even our future, because our research and development team uses it to understand what our customers expect from us in the year to come.”

The collaboration with Forrester has helped Sopra Steria not only cement itself as a thought leader in the digital banking space but also contributed significantly to its retention and new-business efforts. Mercier says that the maturity assessment has helped his team engage or reengage in conversations with several key tier-one bank accounts in France, in one case preventing a downgrade or churn of a key account representing more than €1 million per year in business. The tool has also generated new opportunities around banks’ IT transformation, representing several hundreds of thousands of euros in recurring business annually. “It’s a no-brainer that the DBX has played a great role in companies’ decisions to choose us, or to reinforce the trust they had in us” he says.

The DBX initiative has also attracted global press coverage, including in some of the world’s leading financial publications. Internally, the survey data has provided content that has helped generate dozens of marketing campaigns and associated assets, content for local events, and valuable figures for sales. Mercier notes that the DBX has also helped align geographically disparate teams: “We are a siloed company due to local business units and M&A. The DBX has been a unique tool that brings all teams — marketing, sales, and management — together.”

Sopra Steria recently released its DBX report for 2025, which focuses on various dimensions of financial well-being and what they mean for banks and their customers. The most comprehensive DBX report yet, it also explores AI, cryptocurrency, cybersecurity, and other current trends shaping the financial services industry.

Mercier now plans to expand the work with Forrester to other initiatives, including developing a Net Promoter Score℠ (NPS) framework for use in the largest European banks. He also hopes to replicate the success achieved with the DBX in other divisions of the company. Mercier considers Forrester an extension of his team that’s essential to his success. “It’s a partnership that’s based on mutual trust and respect,” he says. “I give a lot, but it goes both ways. The more I give, the more I get from Forrester.”