Discovery Bank is gearing up for a future in which artificial intelligence (AI) agents will be able to transact and do banking work on behalf of customers.
This is part of a growing trend regarding AI-powered agents, known as agentic AI, taking over more tasks from human beings, for example an agent that works like a personal assistant, making bookings, creating meetings and summarising notes and other important information.
For a bank, this includes AI agents that can handle customer queries, give financial advice, or even approve a credit or loan application.
Discovery Bank CEO Hylton Kallner told Business Day its customers would soon have access to such technology, specifically about payments and resolving queries.
Over the past more than a year the bank has been getting clients used to this type of interaction through a WhatsApp chatbot.
“The pace of development is so rapid, that is inevitably going to happen soon,” he said in an interview.
“In the next few months you’ll start to see full agentic capability from Discovery Bank where you can simply give plain language instructions to your AI banker and it will act on them, with your permissions and app approvals. It will effectively be available 24/7 to make your life really simple.”
Global payments giant Visa is leading this charge. In April, Visa, one of the world’s two major players providing card and payments services to major banks, announced a new suite of technologies that will allow AI systems to make payments on behalf of human customers in e-commerce transactions.
“You’ll be able to instruct an agentic banker to assist you with your banking: pay this account, make a payment to a beneficiary; check my balances, tell me how much is outstanding; and fetch my statements for me.
“All of those kinds of private banking services that are typically only available if you had a relationship banker, are going to become completely mainstream. Just give the instruction and it’s done.”
Kallner said the bank had been putting the pieces together to make this happen for some time.
“We built the first client-facing AI banking capability, via familiar channels like WhatsApp, for our clients.”
This is available across a variety of languages, reducing barriers in a country such as SA.
We built the first client-facing AI banking capability, via familiar channels like WhatsApp, for our clients.
— Hylton Kallner
Discovery Bank CEO
While Kallner is bullish about these agents, the bank’s larger and more established rivals are less so.
Absa and Standard Bank, two of the country’s largest banks, have told Business Day in recent months that they are holding off on the use of AI agents, saying they are still vetting the technology in an effort to reduce potential risk.
While SA’s traditional banks have developed a reputation for being risk averse, due partly to strict laws and regulations, old technology and legacy systems were another factor to consider.
As one of the challengers to digital banks, including Bank Zero and Tyme Bank, that have surfaced in recent years, Discovery Bank is not saddled with either of these issues.
“The most complicated use case, we think, is customer-facing agentic AI, which is where we’ve actually started. We’ve had co-pilots available to our call centre agents for several months now.
“Those are being used on every single call into our call centre, giving accurate information to our bankers for any client queries and making sure the quality of the call is brilliant.
Kallner said AI could also help build incident prevention and root cause analysis to vastly improve security.
In fraud and risk management, for example, AI systems could analyse all payments and interactions faster than humans at a behavioural, individual and transaction level.
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