Capital Appreciation sees opportunity to build AI agents for SA banks

Financial technology group Capital Appreciation (Capprec) sees opportunities to grow its business by building AI agents for SA’s banking industry that can make decisions on behalf of staff and customers.

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. 

This is part of a growing trend around 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, 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. 

Capprec CEO Brad Sacks told Business Day told his firm was excited by what they called “agentic banking”.

“We think agentic banking is a huge opportunity and is the next wave of innovation,” he said. 

“There is no reason we should get our bills on a monthly basis and then have to physically make payment for each of them. I should be able to talk to an agent — through typing, SMS, or other method of engagement — and say: ‘Please pay my telephone bill’ and they just send me a confirmation to do the final authorisation until it learns by habits.”

Capprec’s business includes selling payment terminals such as point-of-sale devices, including debit and credit card machines.

The group also provides the back-end systems that enable these devices to accept payments, and the technology that banks and other financial services companies use to add features to their digital platforms, including loyalty programmes and prepaid vouchers.

The group also builds technology and software solutions for banks. 

“Agentic banking is something which we are very focused on delivering as an innovation to our banking clients. We think it’s going to be a material change in how consumers bank in the years going forward.”

Both 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 banks had developed a reputation of being risk averse, owing in part to strict laws and regulation, Sacks said old technology, or legacy systems were another factor to consider. 

“I wouldn’t characterise it as risk aversion. I would say they are constrained by the legacy technology that they have. To be able to implement agentic banking properly, your existing data and systems need to be able to act in real time to deliver information that allows the agents to be responsive because the agent doesn’t live in a vacuum. The agent has to fetch information from the banking system, [process] that information and then deliver an answer to the consumer.”

Capprec’s strategy is to help banks update their systems, then it can build the AI agent platforms and help integrate with players such as Visa or other payments providers that are making their technology available. 

gavazam@businesslive.co.za