Abu Dhabi Islamic Bank (ADIB) has formed new partnerships to boost its technological capabilities including scaling up its artificial intelligence (AI) and data analytics power.
In the last week, the Islamic bank confirmed it has sealed two deals as part of its aggressive digital agenda. One of the collaborations is with the Ministry of Interior (MOI), allowing the bank to access the ministry’s facial recognition system, thus making it the first bank in the UAE to be able to perform instant and secure verification for digital onboarding. This essentially allows UAE citizens and residents to open an ADIB bank account remotely and instantly.
Facial recognition
“Together with the MOI, we are enabling for the first time in the UAE, residents to open an instant digital account in a secure and seamless way. The use of the facial recognition system is a key step for ADIB toward the implementation of emerging technologies based on AI,” explained Samed Awadallah, the head of ADIB’s branch network.
The involvement of the ministry goes hand in hand with the directives of the UAE government to enhance government and private sector cooperation to provide smart services to the country.
“We are pleased to partner with ADIB to provide digital solutions that enhance the digital agenda of the UAE. This is in line with Ministry of Interior’s efforts to enhance the efficiency of services, as well as support UAE banks in strengthening the security and safety of their digital services against threats of cybercrime,” Lt Colonel Dr Ahmed Saeed Al Shamsi, the head of the Artificial Intelligence Systems and Services Development Team at the General Directorate of Security Support, UAE Ministry of Interior, said.
Chatbot
Facial recognition aside, ADIB also partnered with Verloop.io, an AI-powered customer service automation company, to deploy a natural language processing chatbot to handle, support and resolve the bank’s customer queries and requests.
This new initiative will support its Chatbanking on the WhatsApp service, which allows customers to perform certain banking services. Since its launch in the last quarter of 2020, the service has onboarded about 150,000 customers and processed over 350,000 queries in the second quarter of 2021. A large majority of these queries, about 85%, were resolved without human interaction, leading to a 20% reduction in call center call volume. According to ADIB’s global head of retail, Philip King, the bank achieved 83% accuracy and an average response time of sub-seconds through the AI-powered bot.
Last November, the bank integrated the ability to understand and respond to the Emirati Arabic dialect in addition to classical Arabic into the chatbot as part of its investment in natural language processing to encourage and enhance digital interactions for day-to-day banking tasks.
ADIB has been investing greatly into its digital capabilities, particularly over the last 18 months. In the first six months of 2021, the bank saw a 30% rise in digitally active customers. Currently, about 700,000 customers are considered digitally enabled, representing a record 70% of ADIB’s customer base.