By Kenneth Affor
United Bank for Africa (UBA) has taken the front row in the use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) for financial services in Africa.
This was disclosed at the ongoing Social Media Week Lagos by Mr. Augustine Abolusoro Group Head, UBA Online Banking while speaking with journalists at the event.
“Leo is just the first phase of our artificial intelligence drive where we want to be able to give our customers the options of doing banking from platforms where they already exist.
“Customers will be spending a lot of time on chatting and social media platforms, so we bring back into that space, so the customers don’t need to leave that platform to come to the bank or to go to other applications to be able to reach the bank just within your chat space. Where you are chatting on facebook you could do a banking transaction.
“Artificial intelligence is the future of online banking and banking is going to move away from the traditional methods of making requests, withdraw funds, do transfers. We know that banking is going to move in fully into digital but just within that space is the Artificial Intelligence opportunity where a lot can be done by machines; the using of humans and that is what Leo is meant to help us achieve”.
The bank’s mobile banking chatting platform comes with features such as multilingual functions, financial transactions, enabling financial inclusion, instant response, transaction queries, football update, weather update and entertainment.
