MANAMA: Bank ABC, a leading international bank headquartered in Bahrain, is planning to launch a fully digital and mobile bank with no branches by the fourth quarter this year.
The brand name of the bank will be Ila and in addition to regular staff, it will feature “digital employees” and initially offer products like credit and debit cards.
The concept will be rolled out in phases with additional products and services to be added to the portfolio later.
The announcement was made on the sidelines of the third Middle East and Africa FinTech Forum yesterday, which also saw the public debut of Fatema, who is the region’s first-ever emotionally-intelligent digital employee.
Built by New Zealand-based Soul Machines for Bank ABC, Fatema appears as an on-screen employee and uses cutting-edge digital neurology and artificial intelligence to emotionally engage with customers.
She is capable of engaging in natural conversation with customers, measuring emotions and expressing emotions of her own in return.
Bank ABC Group chief executive Dr Khaled Kawan told the GDN that through Ila they will provide banking services via a mobile phone app, without the need for brick-and-mortar branches as in traditional banking.
“We want to deliver an entirely different banking experience mainly for the millennials – people born after 2000 – and other tech-savvy young people who have completely different expectations from what we think of banking,” he said.
“We will produce a customer experience based totally on a fintech solution whereby we will replicate our retail experience to our customer.”
Dr Kawan said the bank will leverage the strength of ABC and its core systems, and IT services through its subsidiary Arab Financial Services (AFS) to provide the best services to customers.
Deputy group CEO Sael Al Waary said traditional banks have been slow in addressing customer pain-points and what Ila will do is to use technology that has been available to people in other spheres of life to re-imagine the whole banking experience.
Mr Al Waary said they aim to leverage the fintech experience that is disrupting everything and integrate that disruption so that it becomes a momentum.
The region as a whole has one of the lowest rates of bank account penetration in the world, but in recent years regulators from several countries have been making efforts to address this looking at new technologies and approaches.
Banks like Ila are generally known as neobanks.
Many examples already exist in Europe and the US, and their advantage is that they aren’t burdened by legacy systems and cumbersome organisational structures such as branch operations.
Bank ABC is mainly a wholesale bank providing corporate banking, trade finance, project and structured finance, debt capital markets, syndications, treasury products and Islamic banking across Mena, Europe, Asia, the US and Brazil.
It also has retail operations in Jordan, Egypt, Tunisia and Algeria.
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