Backbase Acquires Kasisto as African Banker Survey Names Legacy Information Technology (IT) the Top Barrier to Artificial Intelligence (AI) Adoption

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Backbase (www.Backbase.com) announced the acquisition of 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 follows a recent survey of 277 bank executives across Africa, conducted by Backbase with African Banker magazine (https://apo-opa.co/4f7b9KZ), 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 Ayman Daoud, Vice-President of Africa regions at Backbase. “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.”
Banking-grade agentic AI, embedded in the Banking OS.
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.
Combined with Backbase’s flagship Banking OS, Kasisto’s conversational and agentic AI turns customer intent into governed execution: verifying eligibility, applying policy, and triggering workflows to resolve requests without manual handoffs. The result is AI that not only fields queries but finishes them, with proactive, compliant outbound engagement before a customer need becomes an inbound service request.
“Agentic AI will define how banks compete over the next decade. Africa is a 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.
Backbase’s engagement layer and Kasisto’s transactional AI give African financial institutions a way to bypass traditional IT modernisation cycles that often take years and have high failure rates.
Distributed by APO Group on behalf of Backbase.
Media Contact:
press-relations@backbase.com​
About Backbase:
Backbase built the AI-native Banking OS – the operating system that turns fragmented banking operations into a Unified Frontline. Customers, employees, and AI agents work as one across digital channels, front office, and operations. 120+ leading banks run on Backbase across Retail, SMB & Commercial, Private Banking, and Wealth Management. Recognised by Forrester, Gartner, and Datos as a category leader, Backbase was founded in 2003 by Jouk Pleiter and is headquartered in Amsterdam, with teams across North America, Europe, the Middle East, Africa, Asia-Pacific, and Latin America.
The State of AI in African Banking report will be launched on 15 July in collaboration with African Banker. Click here to find out more (https://apo-opa.co/4f7b9KZ).
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