Backbase has acquired Kasisto, adding agentic AI banking technology to its Banking OS platform.
The deal integrates Kasisto's technology into Backbase's existing architecture, aimed at helping financial institutions address legacy IT constraints that have slowed digital transformation, particularly across African markets.
The acquisition follows a survey of 277 bank executives across Africa, conducted by Backbase together with African Banker magazine, which identified legacy system integration as the primary obstacle to AI adoption among African banks. According to the findings, this bottleneck limits the pace at which established banks can scale digital services relative to cloud-native fintechs and mobile money operators. Maintaining legacy infrastructure carries a significant cost globally, and the survey suggests this burden is particularly pronounced in Africa, where banks contend with high operational costs alongside a mobile-first population that remains largely unbanked.
Ayman Daoud, Vice-President of Africa regions at Backbase, said that the acquisition responds to a structural issue tied to how African banking infrastructure has developed, noting that many banks have built AI capabilities in isolated functions, such as a chatbot for digital self-service or automation within a contact centre, without connecting those functions to back-office operations. It was also mentioned that the aim is to give banks a single system capable of both answering a query and completing the associated task within existing governance and compliance requirements.
Embedding agentic AI into the Banking OS
Kasisto's platform, KAI, is designed specifically for regulated financial environments rather than as a general-purpose AI model. It uses financial-sector large language models (LLMs) intended to operate within banking governance and compliance frameworks. The platform has already been deployed in Africa by Absa and Nedbank; at Nedbank, it reportedly reduced the number of live agent conversations by half within a year of launch.
Combined with the Banking OS, Kasisto's conversational and agentic AI capabilities are intended to convert customer intent into governed execution, covering eligibility verification, policy application, and workflow triggers without manual handoffs. Backbase said the combined offering is designed to support proactive, compliant customer engagement ahead of an inbound service request, in addition to responding to queries as they arise.
Lance Berks, CEO of Kasisto, said agentic AI is expected to shape competitive dynamics among banks over the coming decade, adding that African institutions are positioned to adopt agentic AI capabilities without the legacy core systems that many Western banks operate with.
Backbase said the combination of its engagement layer with Kasisto's transactional AI is intended to offer financial institutions an alternative to traditional IT modernisation cycles, which can span several years and carry a high risk of failure. Financial terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.
