ABAKA has announced the closing of a $5 million second tranche of its Series A round.
The company’s investment round has reportedly been co-led by Lingfeng Capital and Thames Trust, along with contributions from new and existing investors. ABAKA‘s management noted that the proceeds will be used to support its global expansion in Asian markets and ongoing development of its AI-enhanced “hyper-personalized” recommendation engine
For international banking and insurance, artificial intelligence (AI) could potentially “deliver up to US$2.2 trillion of additional value each year, boosting revenues through increased personalization of services, lowering costs through efficiencies, and uncovering new and previously unrealized opportunities through the use of data, says McKinsey & Company (source “The executive AI playbook”, McKinsey.com),” the announcement noted.
As mentioned in a release shared with Crowdfund Insider:
“ABAKA, the London-based AI-recommendation engine and digital retirement solutions provider, will use the new funding to continue to scale and invest in research and development, including the application of Artificial Intelligence (AI) to deliver hyper-personalized digital customer experiences.”
With its AI-engine that has now been trained on more than 10 million retail clients and policy holders, and which is used by organizations like HSBC Group / Prudential Asia, ABAKA has developed an innovative solution that “brings together a financial institution’s relevant customer data augmented with other sources of data for enhanced insights.”
Based on collected data, the AI-engine “predicts what ‘Next Best Action’ or ‘Intelligent Nudge’ will resonate and activates a customer response,” the announcement explained while adding that it “delivers it to the right people, at the right time and through the right channel using a digital engagement platform.”
Fahd Rachidy, Founder and CEO at ABAKA, stated:
“Having developed a unique expertise in the field of pensions, retirement and life insurance, where a personalized and digital customer experience is still rarely offered, we have now also helped our clients engage, retain and acquire customers across retail banking, wealth and non-life insurance through our AI-led digital solutions.”
Rachidy added:
“Today Big Tech giants, marketplaces and the new “Super Apps” are defining customer expectations’ for digital personalised experiences and capturing the product distribution channels: the Banking and Insurance industry need to build their own data and product ecosystems with AI-capabilities to survive. Our machine learning models, and digital solutions help our clients determine in (near) real time the best way to engage with each customer at scale, and capture value through increased customer scale, higher customer LTV and lower operating costs.”
Ma Ning, Founding Partner at Lingfeng Capital, remarked:
“We’re thrilled to support ABAKA in its expansion in the South East Asia and Greater China area and have been impressed by its leadership and incredible team of experts in AI and financial services. Having identified the fast growing demand for AI-powered customer engagement and hyper-personalization in the financial sector, we very much look forward to helping the company scale and to supporting its accelerating growth with both our investment, access to our extensive resources and to our large network of industry partners.”
Steve Berg, Chairman of ABAKA, said:
“I am delighted to have recently joined the Board of ABAKA Holdings Ltd as its Chairman, along with Simon Goldring representing the Thames Trust. ABAKA is now well placed, with the support of its investors and a strengthened Board, to capitalise on the passion and expertise of its people in not only delivering the growth in value to all its stakeholders, but in delivering real benefits to end clients served by ABAKA’s customers.”
As mentioned in the release, ABAKA has developed an AI-powered digital platform that gives the financial services sector “the means to engage, retain and acquire customers.”
With deep expertise and specialization in machine learning and hyper-personalization, ABAKA is a key provider of Artificial Financial Intelligence that “serves the needs of global financial institutions across retail banking, wealth management, retirement and insurance (life and non-life).”
By bringing together advanced data analytics with behavioral science, the company assists financial institutions with offering “hyper-personalized” customer experiences and helps firms with building “a truly customer centric ecosystem across their range of products and services.”
Founded in 2016 with head offices in the UK and additional location across the APAC region and Europe, ABAKA has “expanded with solutions now deployed across three continents.”