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African banks including EcoBank, Attijariwafa Bank, United Bank of Africa, Co-operative Bank of Kenya, Nedbank and Banco Mais are tapping into IBM technologies to help advance financial inclusion across the continent

JOHANNESBURG, Sept. 22, 2021 — IBM today announced that financial institutions across Africa have selected hybrid cloud and AI capabilities from IBM to unlock digital innovation and continue their work to develop digital-first solutions, ultimately aiming to broaden access to financial services on the continent.

“Enterprises face unique challenges when it comes to balancing innovation and regulatory compliance, especially those in highly regulated industries like financial services,” says Alan Peacock, General Manager, IBM Cloud. “For decades, IBM has been fuelling the transformation of the financial services industry, bringing IBM’s industry experience and leadership in security and data privacy to help banks address those challenges and modernize, transform their operations and offer innovation to their customers.”

“In the past year we have seen banks navigate changes brought on by a growing preference for digital and mobile solutions, increasing smartphone penetration and the demand for convenience, innovation, and simplicity from today’s modern consumer,” says Angela Kyerematen-Jimoh, Regional, General Manager for IBM North, East and West Africa. “As banks across the continent take advantage of the opportunity to provide digital financial services which can boost financial inclusion, IBM is working with Africa’s financial groups to deliver intelligent, cloud-based, digital-first innovation through IBM’s hybrid cloud and AI capabilities.”

Ecobank, the pan-African banking conglomerate with banking operations in 33 African countries, has adopted a hybrid cloud approach to extend its reach to millions across Africa. Using IBM Cloud, Ecobank migrated their flagship mobile banking application to leverage the on-demand capacity of resources that can support sudden spikes in traffic on its mobile banking services. Ecobank also has access to other IBM cloud services that can be used to develop more innovative, digital-first solutions to enhance their own client experience.

With over 12 million customers on its flagship mobile application, Ecobank is on an accelerated digital banking transformation journey and is set out to expand its digital offerings and grow the 30 million digital transactions it already processes on its platforms. As part of this journey, the Pan-African banking conglomerate has built scalable business solutions which allow for ease of integration with third-party providers using their open digital banking platform for a growing customer base.

Attijariwafa bank, the Pan African Banking and Financial Group, has adopted IBM hybrid cloud solutions to help advance the digitisation of its banking operations, and more quickly bring new digital services to its customers, all in a security-rich and flexible environment. Using IBM Cloud Paks that are built on Red Hat OpenShift, the bank can streamline and integrate front-and back-office processes to modernise business and IT operations.

By deploying IBM Cloud Paks, Attijariwafa bank aims to modernise and manage its core banking applications like its corporate banking application, in a secured, integrated and scalable environment. This can create richer and simpler customer interactions while helping decrease the time to bring new offerings to market. It can also enable the banks’ employees to focus their effort and time on serving their customers better.

This collaboration with IBM supports the digital transformation strategy of the bank and is designed to facilitate a full modernisation of the bank’s operations in an open, hybrid cloud environment.

United Bank for Africa Plc (UBA), Africa’s global bank operating in 23 countries and with headquarters in Nigeria, has set a goal to grow its transaction volume significantly over the next few years and to deepen retail market penetration. To achieve this, they would be required to attract the unbanked, acquire new customers through digital banking and retain existing customers by adopting a “No Transaction Must Fail (NTMF)” initiative.

Using IBM POWER9-based servers, Flash system storage and IBM PowerVC (Power system virtualization & cloud management), UBA set up a scalable, private cloud environment that is designed to be cost-effective as the bank takes its first step towards embracing a hybrid cloud model.

Customers’ needs are evolving as they seek banking services across channels and expect personalization. Co-operative Bank of Kenya turned to IBM to modernize their core banking platform and reach their customers on different channels including mobile and online while offering customized services driven by insights. For this, they required a technology that would also empower their employees who work across teams to simplify processes and optimize customer data, while also achieving goals like reducing infrastructure and maintenance costs. With IBM Power and FlashStorage solutions, they now have an infrastructure designed to improve insights on customer data, speed query resolutions and time-to-market on new services across channels – all backed by highly available, scalable, cloud-and AI-ready technology.

Banco Mais, a bank in Mozambique, turned to IBM to help streamline its business processes and reduce turnaround times for customer-facing services. In the face of a growing competitive market locally, Banco Mais aimed to develop financial service products faster to retain and gain market share. Banco Mais implemented IBM Business Process Manager on Cloud service and was able to start projects faster and deploy process application solutions without the need to build the IT infrastructure. By turning to this IBM Cloud solution, they developed, tested, ran and monitored their business processes at a fraction of the time it would otherwise have taken. As a result, Banco Mais reports that they reduced turnaround time for loans by 60% and decreased the time it took to implement services that took 3 to 4 months by 85% to improve customer experiences.

Pan-African bank Nedbank aims to deliver superior digital experiences to its customers. To achieve this, the bank is modernizing its core banking applications with a hybrid cloud strategy and has turned to IBM to help bring digital products and services to market. To take advantage of the flexibility and agility offered by modern cloud technologies on this digitalization journey, Nedbank explored a hybrid, multicloud approach, using the IBM Garage methodology to implement IBM Cloud Pak for Integration in order to integrate legacy systems. Through IBM Garage, the bank was able to deep dive and explore fresh solutions and in a matter of weeks achieved what would have taken them months. This has enabled Nedbank to shift their legacy applications into the cloud and integrate with other cloud-based applications as they modernize and position for future innovation.

Earlier this year, IBM announced the general availability of the industry’s first financial services-ready cloud platform, IBM Cloud for Financial Services, as well IBM Cloud Satellite. First revealed in 2019, the IBM Cloud for Financial Services is designed to help reduce risk for financial institutions, their partners and FinTechs, and innovate quickly with built-in controls that are adhered to by the entire ecosystem. IBM Cloud Satellite brings a secured, unifying layer of cloud services for clients across environments, regardless of where their data resides. As workloads shift to the edge, IBM Cloud Satellite helps clients deliver low latency, while still enabling them to have the same levels of security, data privacy, interoperability and open standards found in hybrid cloud environments.

ARMONK, N.Y., Sept. 15, 2021 — IBM announced today its first IBM Cloud Multizone Region (MZR) in Spain and a new agreement with CaixaBank, a leading financial group in Spain, to boost the bank’s digital capabilities by joining this MZR and embracing IBM Cloud for Financial Services.

IBM has been a technology partner of CaixaBank for more than 50 years. Under this agreement, CaixaBank will launch its CloudNow project which aims to evolve business core applications, improve efficiencies and reinforce its innovative vision of financial services with increased availability and resiliency.

“IBM has become an indispensable partner in the development of CaixaBank’s digital capabilities, not only due to its in-depth understanding of the financial sector’s challenges, but also because it has enabled us to advance into future of banking. This collaboration has helped us to combine our current technological infrastructures with an updated environment boosted by cloud technology and artificial intelligence. The new MZR is a key milestone to keep offering our 21 million customers the best user experience we can while maintaining the highest levels of information confidentiality and protection,” Gonzalo Gortazar, CEO of CaixaBank said.

To help scale hybrid cloud adoption, IBM’s new MZR is designed to enable European clients to deploy mission-critical workloads with high levels of security, and address their data sovereignty and regulatory compliance requirements. IBM’s expanded footprint signals its continued investment to help foster business growth in Europe and is expected to create hundreds of jobs in Spain. IBM continues to support the EU’s efforts to build greater trust in the digital economy.

“IBM is proud to provide CaixaBank with a technology platform that is designed to deliver the highest levels of trust, security and privacy. IBM’s hybrid cloud and AI solutions will help CaixaBank strengthen its business model and improve its customer experience. This partnership is a great example of our commitment to apply the power of technology to help business and society thrive,” said IBM CEO, Arvind Krishna.

The IBM Cloud for Financial Services incorporates built-in security and compliance controls to help companies reduce regulatory barriers impeding IT landscape and application modernization. Supported by a growing ecosystem of more than 100 technology partners and FinTechs, the platform is designed to speed financial institutions’ transformations while addressing potential systemic industry risks throughout the supply chain.

As part of this agreement, Kyndryl, the new, independent public company that will be created following the separation of IBM’s Managed Infrastructure Services business, will help CaixaBank to integrate their new hybrid cloud model while the bank leverages IBM Global Business Services’ deep industry expertise to continuously support their industry innovation capabilities.

IBM MZRs are composed of three or more data centers with each being an individual Availability Zone. This is designed so that a single failure event can affect only a single data center rather than all zones – allowing for consistent cloud services and greater resiliency to help clients continuously run mission-critical workloads. CaixaBank and other enterprises across Europe will have access to our security, automation, and Red Hat capabilities, along with IBM Cloud’s network, helping clients address their data sovereignty and compliance regulations as they move along their hybrid cloud journey.

To learn more about IBM’s insights and solutions for the global banking industry, visit www.ibm.com/banking.

ARMONK, N.Y., Sept. 9, 2021 — IBM today announced the launch of new AI and automation capabilities in IBM Watson Assistant designed to make it easier for businesses to create enhanced customer service experiences across any channel – phone, web, SMS and any messaging platform. This includes a new collaboration with IntelePeer, a leading Communications Platform-as-a-Service provider, to set up and test a voice agent, and a new agent app designed to enable a seamless hand-off to a live agent while maintaining the conversation’s context.

Virtual assistants are gaining popularity due to ongoing improvements in natural language processing (NLP) and automation. According to IBM’s 2021 Global AI Adoption Index, 52 percent of global IT professionals surveyed report that their company is using or considering NLP solutions to improve customer experiences.

IBM is adding new features in Watson Assistant, the company’s intelligent virtual agent, to help businesses leverage AI and NLP to address customer issues on first contact.  Watson Assistant is designed to more quickly provide customers with relevant answers over the phone, SMS, web, or any messaging platform, and seamlessly hand-off to a live agent when additional support is needed. The new features include:

• Add voice capabilities to Watson Assistant: The IntelePeer Atmosphere Communications Platform-as-a-Service is now available as an add-on in Watson Assistant so that users with a Plus or Enterprise plan can set up voice capabilities and a new phone number for a virtual agent quickly. If businesses already have an existing contact center phone system, IntelePeer can also provide the connection between Watson Assistant and the existing phone system using industry standards. Using IntelePeer, Watson Assistant is now designed to connect to nearly every major contact center platform that uses the SIP protocol in as little as half an hour with no coding.
• Help customers resolve issues on first contact with Watson Assistant Search Skill: Watson Assistant’s Search Skill feature now includes short-answer retrieval, which is based on an innovative question-answering (QA) system from IBM Research. This enables the virtual agent to return an answer — in a few words — from longer sentences or passages and provide the context on where the answer came from. FAQ extraction is also now generally available in Search Skill. FAQ extraction is designed to help administrators keep the virtual agent up to date with broader sources of information, without having to constantly make manual updates.
• Facilitate a seamless hand-off with the new agent app: Watson Assistant’s new agent app feature is designed to help customer service agents pick up with a customer right where the virtual agent left off. When a customer calls in, IBM’s speech detection models, which are designed to provide more accurate transcriptions out-of-the-box, deliver a near real-time transcription of the conversation. When the hand-off occurs, the new agent app provides the customer service agent with the latest transcript right on their screen. This means customers don’t have to repeat their questions and agents are empowered to resolve issues even more quickly.

“One critical challenge facing nearly every business today is the need to better communicate with their customers and employees across all channels,” said Daniel Hernandez, General Manager of Data and AI, IBM. “We’re continuously delivering new innovations in natural language processing, automation and advancing responsible AI, and building a strong, open ecosystem with partners like IntelePeer to help businesses transform customer care with Watson Assistant.”

State of Rhode Island Adopted IBM Watson Assistant to Transform its Contact Center
In addition to the new features announced today, IBM also announced that organizations of all sizes have turned to Watson Assistant to help them address customer problems in the face of rising call volumes.

For example, when new COVID-19 cases began to surge last year, the State of Rhode Island realized fielding hundreds of thousands of calls from concerned residents was unsustainable. The State needed to improve its engagement with residents with more efficient processes and timely updates to rapidly changing COVID information.

To address untenable workloads, the State turned to Watson Assistant to address the engagement processes with residents and to improve the support with the contact center. IBM Global Business Services (GBS) and the State of Rhode Island launched a virtual agent, “RHODA,” that uses Watson Assistant to answer questions about COVID-19 in both English and Spanish. Since October 2020, RHODA has had more than 100,000 conversations on topics related to test scheduling, test results, travel restrictions, and vaccine eligibility. In addition, IBM GBS integrated Watson Assistant into the IVR for Vaccine Appointment Scheduling to help enable an improved experience for individuals that needed assistance with appointment scheduling.

“The pandemic slammed my team at the State of Rhode Island Department of Health and we quickly realized that our outdated systems and smaller call centers were completely unequipped to handle the influx of phone calls from concerned citizens, forcing us to pull staff from all directions within the department,” said Kristine Campagna, COO of COVID Operations, Rhode Island Department of Health. “With IBM’s wealth of experience in AI, we were able to work together to seamlessly integrate Watson Assistant into our call centers, helping us provide thousands of citizens in a matter of days with information about COVID-19.”

ARMONK, N.Y., Sept. 9, 2021 — IBM today announced the launch of new AI and automation capabilities in IBM Watson Assistant designed to make it easier for businesses to create enhanced customer service experiences across any channel – phone, web, SMS and any messaging platform. This includes a new collaboration with IntelePeer, a leading Communications Platform-as-a-Service provider, to set up and test a voice agent, and a new agent app designed to enable a seamless hand-off to a live agent while maintaining the conversation’s context.

Virtual assistants are gaining popularity due to ongoing improvements in natural language processing (NLP) and automation. According to IBM’s 2021 Global AI Adoption Index, 52 percent of global IT professionals surveyed report that their company is using or considering NLP solutions to improve customer experiences.

IBM is adding new features in Watson Assistant, the company’s intelligent virtual agent, to help businesses leverage AI and NLP to address customer issues on first contact.  Watson Assistant is designed to more quickly provide customers with relevant answers over the phone, SMS, web, or any messaging platform, and seamlessly hand-off to a live agent when additional support is needed.

• Add voice capabilities to Watson Assistant: The IntelePeer Atmosphere Communications Platform-as-a-Service is now available as an add-on in Watson Assistant so that users with a Plus or Enterprise plan can set up voice capabilities and a new phone number for a virtual agent quickly. If businesses already have an existing contact center phone system, IntelePeer can also provide the connection between Watson Assistant and the existing phone system using industry standards. Using IntelePeer, Watson Assistant is now designed to connect to nearly every major contact center platform that uses the SIP protocol in as little as half an hour with no coding.
• Help customers resolve issues on first contact with Watson Assistant Search Skill: Watson Assistant’s Search Skill feature now includes short-answer retrieval, which is based on an innovative question-answering (QA) system from IBM Research. This enables the virtual agent to return an answer — in a few words — from longer sentences or passages and provide the context on where the answer came from. FAQ extraction is also now generally available in Search Skill. FAQ extraction is designed to help administrators keep the virtual agent up to date with broader sources of information, without having to constantly make manual updates.
• Facilitate a seamless hand-off with the new agent app: Watson Assistant’s new agent app feature is designed to help customer service agents pick up with a customer right where the virtual agent left off. When a customer calls in, IBM’s speech detection models, which are designed to provide more accurate transcriptions out-of-the-box, deliver a near real-time transcription of the conversation. When the hand-off occurs, the new agent app provides the customer service agent with the latest transcript right on their screen. This means customers don’t have to repeat their questions and agents are empowered to resolve issues even more quickly.

“One critical challenge facing nearly every business today is the need to better communicate with their customers and employees across all channels,” said Daniel Hernandez, General Manager of Data and AI, IBM. “We’re continuously delivering new innovations in natural language processing, automation and advancing responsible AI, and building a strong, open ecosystem with partners like IntelePeer to help businesses transform customer care with Watson Assistant.”

State of Rhode Island Adopted IBM Watson Assistant to Transform its Contact Center
In addition to the new features announced today, IBM also announced that organizations of all sizes have turned to Watson Assistant to help them address customer problems in the face of rising call volumes.

For example, when new COVID-19 cases began to surge last year, the State of Rhode Island realized fielding hundreds of thousands of calls from concerned residents was unsustainable. The State needed to improve its engagement with residents with more efficient processes and timely updates to rapidly changing COVID information.

To address untenable workloads, the State turned to Watson Assistant to address the engagement processes with residents and to improve the support with the contact center. IBM Global Business Services (GBS) and the State of Rhode Island launched a virtual agent, “RHODA,” that uses Watson Assistant to answer questions about COVID-19 in both English and Spanish. Since October 2020, RHODA has had more than 100,000 conversations on topics related to test scheduling, test results, travel restrictions, and vaccine eligibility. In addition, IBM GBS integrated Watson Assistant into the IVR for Vaccine Appointment Scheduling to help enable an improved experience for individuals that needed assistance with appointment scheduling.

“The pandemic slammed my team at the State of Rhode Island Department of Health and we quickly realized that our outdated systems and smaller call centers were completely unequipped to handle the influx of phone calls from concerned citizens, forcing us to pull staff from all directions within the department,” said Kristine Campagna, COO of COVID Operations, Rhode Island Department of Health. “With IBM’s wealth of experience in AI, we were able to work together to seamlessly integrate Watson Assistant into our call centers, helping us provide thousands of citizens in a matter of days with information about COVID-19.”

ARMONK, N.Y., Sept. 2, 2021 — Today, IBM is announcing an updated, customized experience powered by IBM Watson artificial intelligence (AI) technology in the ESPN Fantasy App designed to make the game more engaging for fantasy football players. New this year, IBM is launching customizable and more simplified projections and player comparisons in the Trade Assistant with Watson tool. Building on last season’s successful launch of Trade Assistant with Watson, the tool now allows ESPN fantasy football players to customize trade preferences, get personalized trade recommendations and view data-driven metrics to transparently explain suggested trades.

Customizing the Trades
To improve the game for fantasy players of all levels and skillsets, IBM worked with ESPN to create a more customizable, transparent and understandable experience within the ESPN Fantasy App. Trade Assistant with IBM Watson was initially introduced to reduce the complexities of fantasy football trades by using AI to suggest trades and to assess the fairness and value of a proposed trade. Now within the app, fantasy players can personalize their trade packages by identifying Players of Interest (Watch List), Players to Trade, Players NOT to Trade, and Positions to Trade.

Also new this year, Trade Assistant can offer “No Brainer” Trade Suggestions, which include basic trade recommendations designed for newer fantasy football players who may not be aware of glaring issues with their lineups, such as missing positions or too few players on their roster. In addition, Trade Assistant will focus on “1 for 1” or “2 for 2” trades, meaning trading one player for one other player, instead of more complex trade suggestions. These improvements are the result of IBM and ESPN working together to address user feedback and to engage new and less experienced fantasy players over the past few years.

More Data
This season Trade Assistant will offer more data and analytics within the app to provide a more transparent explanation for suggested trades, so fantasy players can better understand why certain trades are recommended. Within the experience, Trade Assistant will now provide a Weekly Scoring Average that compares an individual’s team to the rest of the teams in their league, showing pre- and post-trade values within the app. The app will also offer insights into “fair trades” and the “boom percentage” pre-and post-trades, meaning Trade Assistant will show whether the players in the trade are more likely to “boom” (play better than projected) or “bust” (play worse than projected) after a proposed trade.

Using IBM Watson Discovery‘s natural language processing (NLP) capabilities, Trade Assistant is based on trustworthy AI and is able to suggest trades, as well as provide additional insights by extracting, translating and reviewing inputs on football players and teams, such as player stats and experts’ sentiment from various sources, including ESPN.com, news articles, blogs, and podcast transcripts. With IBM Watson Studio’s AutoAI capabilities and the IBM Research AI Fairness 360 toolkit, ESPN can now streamline the process of constructing and training models, while providing in-depth analysis into why certain decisions were made. Within Trade Assistant, which runs on IBM Cloud, ESPN is also able to address bias or unfair predictions along selected attributes, such as a player’s team.

Insights on IBM Cloud
For the 2021 season, IBM is continuing Player Insights with Watson to help fantasy players better understand matchups, analyze players’ boom or bust chances, and assess the impact of injuries on their rosters. The redeployed Player Insights with Watson builds on features launched last year that offered player comparison and share capabilities.

The technologies behind both Player Insights with Watson and Trade Assistant with Watson use AI running on a hybrid cloud architecture to help improve the experience of playing fantasy football. These features are built on containerized apps using Red Hat OpenShift, and run on IBM Cloud. IBM developers creating these features are able to quickly build and securely deploy new solutions in any environment, due to the flexibility of the cloud.

“IBM’s technologies help to make ESPN Fantasy Football more interactive for our fans and differentiated from other products,” said Chris Jason, senior director, product management, Disney Media and Entertainment Distribution, Fantasy Sports. “Players of all levels can use the IBM Trade Assistant and Player Insights tools to make more informed decisions and better compete against their friends, which creates a more engaging experience.”

“Our innovations within the ESPN Fantasy App reflect the work we do with clients all over the world. IBM Watson is helping make sense of complex data, and creating interactive, customizable experiences using AI and cloud technology. The same technologies in the Fantasy Football app that explain trades can also help streamline complexities, improve workflows and engage customers for businesses of all sizes,” said Noah Syken, Vice President of Sports & Entertainment Partnerships, IBM.

EHNINGEN, Germany and ARMONK, N.Y., Sept. 2, 2021 — IBM and Mercedes announced the successful development of “Urban Guard – Stolen Vehicle Help,” a recently launched service in the Mercedes me app designed to help find and recover stolen vehicles. The solution builds on prior collaboration between IBM and Daimler, Mercedes’ parent company, to develop connected car services such as “ready to.”

According to National Insurance Crime Bureau, a U.S. industry membership organization, car thefts saw a 9.2 percent increase in 2020. Digital, connected car services can offer a solution to help address this risk and enhance the potential for law enforcement to recover lost or stolen vehicles.

Built into the Mercedes me App, the “Urban Guard – Stolen Vehicle Help” service is designed to help customers and law enforcement track and recover stolen vehicles. Given the importance of speed in the event of a theft, the “Stolen Vehicle Help” service collects relevant vehicle and customer data that can help law enforcement identify and recover a vehicle. This data, along with the vehicle position data is then shared with law enforcement via a service partner which is authorized to communicate with world-wide police stations.

In close collaboration, IBM Global Business Services and Mercedes together analysed and defined the end-to-end process: From the front-end customer experience in the event of a theft, to the process of securely sharing the live data and the backend processing.

IBM Global Business Services developed the back-end using cloud-native open-source technologies, such as the Red Hat build of Quarkus, to achieve high-speed performance. As implementation partner, IBM Global Business Services delivers the technical interaction between the various involved parties and existing systems, such as customer data APIs and call center tools.

“Increasingly, consumers expect and value digital, connected services equally to the drive performance of the vehicle, meaning connected car experiences are as important as horsepower or handling,” said Juergen Braun, Vice President and Industry Leader Industrial, Automotive IBM DACH. “Developing connected car services that help safeguard the owner’s investment is a meaningful way for Mercedes to deepen its relationship with its customers, as well as differentiate itself.”

The “Urban Guard – Stolen Vehicle Help” service was initially made available to European customers in November 2020. Following effective recovery efforts, the service is now available to eligible customers in select countries in North America and Asia Pacific.