This Dubai-based startup helps financial institutions improve customer experience by blending AI with banking

Having spent 20 years in the banking tech industry across 50 countries, Aditya Bhagat and Surya Prasad realised that there is a major gap in the customer expectations, and the offerings from financial institutions. They also realised that artificial intelligence (AI) has the potential to bridge this gap but, the implementation of the AI layer in banking requires deep domain and banking technology expertise. Therefore, the duo decided to leverage their experience to build functional AI products to ease AI deployment and enhance the customer experience in the shortest time. Founded in 2017, BankBuddy's platform combines bots, workflow automation, computer vision, big data, and natural language interactions to help financial institutions with customer experience management, hyper-personalisation, and operations automation. Aditya believes that with rapid disruption in the financial services space from fintechs and big tech companies, and expected changes in the business models from open banking, the survival of financial services companies will hinge on the low cost of customer acquisition, excellent proactive service, and continuous cross-sell, upsell, and retention. The company, though based in Dubai, provides service to about 11 countries including India.