en.Wedoany.com Reported - Backbase has announced the acquisition of Kasisto, a pioneer in agentic AI for banking and financial services. Kasisto's agentic platform, financial services intelligence, and its New York-based team have officially joined Backbase and the AI-native Banking OS.
This acquisition integrates Kasisto's financial intelligence models into the Backbase platform, creating an architecture that helps financial institutions overcome traditional IT limitations—a barrier that has previously hindered digital transformation in Africa.
Prior to the announcement, Backbase and African Banker magazine conducted a survey of 277 African banking executives. The results showed that legacy system integration is the primary obstacle to AI adoption. This bottleneck makes it difficult for established institutions to rapidly scale digital products and compete with agile, cloud-native fintech companies and mobile money operators.
Legacy system maintenance costs billions of dollars globally, but its impact is particularly severe in Africa. African banks face high operational costs and a growing mobile-first unbanked population.
Ayman Daoud, Vice President of Backbase Africa, stated that the acquisition aims to address specific structural constraints in African banking growth. He noted that many banks are building AI in silos—deploying chatbots for digital self-service or automating contact centers—but these solutions fail to address the disconnect between teams and back-office operations. By embedding Kasisto's reasoning AI into the core operating model, Backbase provides African banks with a system capable of answering questions and completing back-office tasks within regulatory compliance frameworks.
Kasisto's platform, KAI, is purpose-built for regulated financial environments, unlike general-purpose AI models. It uses specialized financial large language models (LLMs) that understand context, apply institutional judgment, and operate within banking governance and compliance frameworks. In Africa, the platform has been successfully deployed at Absa and Nedbank. At Nedbank, the platform reduced live agent conversations by 50% within one year of launch.
Combined with Backbase's flagship Banking OS, Kasisto's conversational and agentic AI transforms customer intent into governed execution processes: verifying eligibility, applying policies, and triggering workflows to complete requests without manual handoffs. The result is an AI that not only handles inquiries but actually completes tasks, proactively conducting compliant outbound interactions before customer needs escalate into inbound service requests.
Lance Berks, CEO of Kasisto, stated that agentic AI will define how banks compete over the next decade. He believes Africa is particularly well-positioned to leapfrog Western banks burdened by decades-old core systems. Backbase and Kasisto provide these institutions with purpose-built agentic intelligence from day one, rather than retrofitting legacy infrastructure.
Backbase's interaction layer and Kasisto's transactional AI offer African financial institutions a way to bypass traditional IT modernization cycles, which typically take years and have high failure rates.
