JOHANNESBURG, South Africa, July 7/APO Group: Backbase has acquired Kasisto, a pioneer in agentic AI for banking and financial services. Kasisto’s agentic platform, financial services intelligence, and New York-based team are now part of Backbase and the AI-native Banking OS.
The transaction integrates Kasisto’s financial intelligence models into the Backbase platform, building an architecture that helps financial institutions overcome legacy IT constraints that have stymied digital transformation across Africa.
This announcement comes in the wake of a recent survey tracking 277 bank executives across Africa, conducted by Backbase with African Banker magazine, which revealed legacy system integration as the primary obstacle to AI adoption. This bottleneck prevents established institutions from scaling digital offerings fast enough to compete with agile, cloud-native fintechs and mobile money operators.
Legacy maintenance costs billions globally, but the impact is especially acute in Africa, where banks face high operational costs and a growing mobile-first unbanked population.
“This acquisition addresses a structural constraint specific to how African banking has grown,” said Vice-President of Africa region at Backbase, Ayman Daoud. “We see too many banks build AI in isolated pockets, like a chatbot in digital self-service or automation in the contact centre, without resolving the disconnect between those teams and back-office operations. By embedding Kasisto’s reasoning AI into the core operating model, we’re giving African banks one system that can answer a question and complete the work behind it within the governance and compliance regulators require.“
Kasisto’s platform, KAI, is purpose-built for regulated financial environments, unlike general-purpose AI models. It uses specialised financial LLMs that understand context, apply institutional judgment, and operate strictly within banking governance and compliance frameworks. In the continent, the platform has already been successfully deployed by Absa and Nedbank, where, in the latter, it cut the number of live agent conversations by half within just a year of launch.
“Agentic AI will define how banks compete over the next decade. Africa is particularly well placed to leapfrog Western banks with decades-old core systems. Backbase and Kasisto give those institutions purpose-built agentic intelligence from day one, rather than retrofitting it onto legacy infrastructure later,” said Lance Berks, CEO of Kasisto.
