The United Bank for Africa (UBA) has launched Leo, its artificial intelligence bot, on Apple business chat to help merchants drive their businesses and the cashless policy of the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN).
Speaking at the launch in Lagos, the Group Managing Director and Chief Executive (GMD/CEO) of UBA, Kennedy Uzoka, said with Leo now on all IOS devices in English, the bank planned to launch in all other languages across the African countries in October, 2019.
Currently, Leo is live in English, Portuguese, French and Swahili, with the capacity to do the basic things that customers expect from the bank such as transferring money, utilities bills payment, scheduling payments and airtime top-up.
Uzoka noted that the bank’s aspiration to ensure its customers got the best in terms of service had been a determinant of who it partnered with to develop the technology.
He said, “UBA currently operates in 20 African countries with over 18 million customers and our aspiration is to see this figure grow rapidly; and we know that serving this number of customers will require a lot of resources.
“There are usually two approaches, human or machine-driven. Man usually makes errors, but with artificial intelligence, the error rate is tending towards zero, so we believe that since serving customers is at the heart of our strategy, we must go in that direction which is why we have deployed AI to serve our customers.
“Since we launched Leo, which started on Facebook Messenger, and then was launched four months after in the Facebook Conference and subsequently towards the end of the year it went up on WhatsApp as well, we have not had one customer complaint; which is an amazing accomplishment in our business.”
He furthered assured that Leo would give convenience to people who did not find it convenient to enter banking halls, adding that “as you know cashless transactions have taken effect in Nigeria, so Leo came at the right time. It would also help merchants because the uniqueness of Leo in IOS is that we are going beyond the limits as it is called Apple Business Chat; which makes it different as it would effectively serve merchants.
“Prior to today, we were massively recruiting people, but with Leo, we have diverted over 180 customer agent transactions, which means Leo has been able to support our human staff and provide better services to our customers.
On his part, the Group Head, Online Banking at UBA, Austine Abolusoro, said, “Leo is an Artificial Intelligence bot that has been developed by UBA. What we are doing today as a bank is to see how we can put numerous processes on a platform that is called Leo in order to help our customers interact with us and conduct their transactions without having to wait for any human.
“Leo is also very simple to use, it is as simple as chatting with a friend the way it is done on WhatsApp or iMessage is the same way when operating Leo; and it is powered to take on banking transactions and bank inquiries.
“If you want to know about UBA you can chat with Leo, if you want to make a transaction and you have an account with UBA you can link that account through Leo in order to check your account balance, buy airtime, transfer funds, check statements and also buy tickets. It is also very secure as we continue to expand on that giving the fact that we have added different levels of security so we are almost always sure that the owner of the account is the one operating it on Leo, or at least if it is not the owner the owner must have given out his credentials to another individual”.
