The term digital experience platform (DXP) has gained a lot of buzz in recent years, but the idea that a single platform can manage and personalize every digital interaction across all channels is, in practice, a misnomer. The reality is that most DXPs are simply rebranded content management systems (CMS) with limited reach beyond the website.
A traditional CMS handles content creation and website publishing, while a DXP promises to drive digital experiences across all your marketing channels. This sounds powerful, but in most real-world bank CMS implementations, the website remains the dominant channel, and the results often look much more modest than what was promised.
For example, while some include email tools, few banks rely on their CMS to manage complex, automated email marketing. Instead, they use dedicated systems like HubSpot or Salesforce’s Marketing Cloud. Beyond email, bank marketers need to rely on the online banking platform, mobile app, SMS, digital signage, chat apps and customer service reps to deliver content and messages to customers. DXPs can help as a content repository with some custom integrations, but that’s about it. The other tools are driving their own experiences with their own data and context.
The Universal Truths of Digital Experience
1. Eighty percent of customer interactions occur outside the website or DXP.
2. DXPs can integrate with other marketing tools, not core operational systems.
3. Every industry now manages 10+ critical digital touchpoints, and most DXPs excel at only one.
4. The most valuable customer data often lives in systems the DXP can’t natively access.
Why Many Banks Feel Locked-In
Banks frequently invest millions in large DXP suites but realize soon after that all other touchpoints either sit outside of the DXP or require heavy custom work to integrate them. Marketing teams then find themselves facing one of the most common and persistent challenges: high reliance on development teams to get the work done. This dependence drives up costs and slows down progress across the board.
One regional bank, for example, invested more than $1 million in an implementation, then another $500,000 per year in maintenance. The result? Advanced website personalization but no ability to extend those experiences into mobile banking, the customer portal or branch systems without significant custom code. Marketing agility suffered, and the team struggled to move quickly in an environment that demands speed.
Many banks now find themselves migrating away from traditional DXPs in favor of flexible, headless and composable ecosystems, allowing them to invest in the capabilities that truly drive growth and customer engagement. By 2026, Gartner projects at least 70% of organizations will be mandated to acquire composable technology over monolithic DXP suites… compared to 50% in 2023.
Moving Beyond the Primary Website Experience
A bank’s real differentiator lies in how seamlessly it connects transactions, mobile engagement, digital marketing, branch experience and customer service. For years, digital teams debated whether to build or buy their DXP to accomplish this. But the most innovative banks have moved on to a new question, “How do we compose the right marketing and technology ecosystem from best-of-breed tools?”
The famous MarTech Map offers a list of over 15,000 marketing technology tools. These best of breed systems excel at their primary focus and, when used together, create a much more powerful system. Banks can create composable ecosystems that outperform traditional DXPs in agility, scalability and customer experience by focusing on three main pillars to create the core of their DX ecosystem:
• A CMS to manage content.
• A data warehouse to unify and store customer information.
• A customer data platform (CDP) to activate that data across channels.
Data flows seamlessly between these systems to create an architecture that actually results in multi-channel readiness and enterprise-level personalization.
The Role of AI
Artificial intelligence (AI) is the accelerant of a composable system. True AI-driven marketing requires systems that are built with application programming interfaces, are flexible and open, which enables AI to orchestrate actions across multiple platforms. This goes far beyond chatbots or auto-generated content.
AI can monitor data patterns, discover new audience segments, automate campaign creation and dynamically optimize experiences. Monolithic DXPs cannot support this level of orchestration.
A Practical Implementation Path
• Crawl. Begin with a CMS that supports behavioral tracking and basic personalization (for example, CMS plus basic analytics).
• Walk. Add CRM or marketing automation platforms and integrate them into a unified customer data system.
• Run. Deploy a data warehouse and a customer data platform (CDP) as the hub, connecting additional channels (mobile, portal, signage).
• Fly. Introduce an AI orchestration layer capable of synchronizing all systems, enabling real-time personalization across channels.
For banks, the future of digital engagement depends not on a single platform but on the intelligent orchestration of many. The real platform isn’t the CMS, it’s the data layer that powers context, prediction and personalization across every touchpoint.
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