In case you are not familiar with Leo, he is the artificial intelligent bot that serves UBA (United Bank for Africa; a leading pan-African financial services group headquartered in Nigeria) customers via Facebook Messenger.
Since 2007, Facebook has been hosting the Facebook F8 Developers’ Conference, which brings together developers and entrepreneurs from all over the world to chart the way forward with regards to building products and services around the social networking platform.
The 2018’s F8 was held at the McEnery Convention Center in San Jose, California (yes, in the Silicon Valley). The conference, as usual, was marked with new announcements such as Facebook’s new dating platform, the introduction of Instagram Video chat, VR memories, and Oculus VR headset and TV among other innovations.
Facebook’s CEO and founder Mark Zuckerberg made an hour-long presentation at the conference. When he was talking about how useful bots have become via the Messenger app, he used UBA’s Leo as ‘case study.’ That in itself goes to show how important technology has become to the African financial landscape. So much so that a FinTech solution developed in Africa would be used for demonstration at a world-stage platform for the techies.
Messenger has over 300,000 bots, but Leo got the prime time mention by none other than Facebook’s CEO. You might be interested to know that Leo has only been around for less than six months. The Bank launched it as a ‘Chat Banker’ to enable its customers to perform their banking transactions right on Facebook.
Leo enables customers to open new bank accounts, get transactions notifications instantly, check their account balance, top up airtime, and send money. The bot also enables you to confirm cheques, pay your utility bills, freeze an account, apply for a loan, and check your mini statement among other things. And all that takes place right in your Messenger app while you are on the go.
UBA customers have even referred to Leo as a perfect buddy and lifestyle application. To get the app, go to Facebook on the web or mobile version and type in ‘UBA ChatBanking’ in the search area of Messenger.
