IntelliEngage Qorus Reinvention Awards - MEA 2025 - Winner

Concept and objectives

With approximately 40% of African people still living below the poverty line, showing up in the moments that matter has never been more important. Overwhelmed with choice-overload and complexity within financial services, clients need individualised products and services, coupled with the right advice, at the right time, within the right context and through their preferred channels. Furthermore, with over 850mil people in Africa having access to mobile devices, leveraging digital channels presented a valuable opportunity.

We stepped up to the challenge to meet these critically important needs by developing IntelliEngage, our groundbreaking, in-house built, Pan-African, omni-channel engagement and recommendation system.

IntelliEngage transforms traditional customer conversations into meaningful relationship-building opportunities by leveraging advanced data, analytics, machine learning, AI, and behavioural sciences, thereby surpassing conventional, rule-based next-best-action systems.

IntelliEngage isn’t your standard recommendation system. It deciphers complex client interactions to identify individual needs and surfaces the most relevant product, solutions and service recommendations. As a client-first conversation engine, it intelligently sequences and prioritises engagements based on what matters most to the client, ensuring they can leverage on positioned opportunities in solving their financial needs.

Its comprehensive omni-channel capability delivers these hyper-personalised engagements across a vast array of touchpoints but takes it a step further by employing optimisation models at each endpoint to suppress or limit interactions based on most relevant customer data points. This prevents clients from being “spammed”, while ensuring the right conversations reaches the right client, at the right time, through the right channel, with the right experience.

From its inception as a groundbreaking platform for bankers to drive meaningful conversations, IntelliEngage has undergone a remarkable evolution, growing rapidly into a sophisticated hyper-personalisation and recommender platform that now seamlessly integrates with both bankers and direct channels.

In the past 18 months, IntelliEngage was reimagined as the client-first recommendation system it is today, delivering the following: • Direct to client engagement channels which encompasses WhatsApp, digital apps, push notifications, in-app messages, SMS, and email • Scaling IntelliEngage beyond South Africa, deploying it across 11 new countries (Lesotho, Uganda, Namibia, Botswana, eSwatini, Zambia, Malawi, Kenya, Tanzania, Zimbabwe, Ghana), with minimal development effort and investment, but still catering for country-specific data and client requirements • Expansion of physical channels by enabling more frontline users, now including Wealth Managers as well as financial planners who form part of the Standard Bank Financial Consultants entity • Adopting “user-led” design principles as the design ethos • Expanding the typical definition of measurement beyond operational elements like adoption and engagement, to factor in customer satisfaction and business impact, creating universal appeal to multiple product and business lines within the organisation • Maturing the measurement framework to create a better feedback loop for model improvement, helping inform more client-centric prioritization for time-sensitive decisions

Across Africa, our clients now experience seamless, hyper-personalised engagements; whether via our mobile app, relationship managers, or contact centre, they receive the most relevant conversations, empowering them to elevate their financial wellbeing.

Reasons behind and sources of inspiration

IntelliEngage was born from a visionary in-house passion project initiated by a dedicated group of data scientists, translators, and business executives. They confronted a critical challenge: bankers, despite their best intentions, faced immense difficulty delivering high-quality, truly meaningful, and contextual client interactions. A lack of relevant data and insights, coupled with the sheer scale of customers per banker, meant that proactive, personalised client engagement remained an elusive dream.

A rigorous evaluation of existing technology stacks and conventional next-best-action (NBA) systems quickly revealed their limitations. These off-the-shelf solutions, often confined to simple, rule-based triggers primarily focused on product cross-sell, simply failed to meet our ambitious core requirements for a truly customer centric, intelligent, seamlessly omni-channel, and infinitely scalable platform. Crucially, they lacked the inherent flexibility to be tailored across diverse geographies, segments, and customer endpoints. Recognising this critical gap, and armed with an unparalleled, in-house understanding of our clients, IntelliEngage was conceived as a disruptive, in-house built solution – designed to be truly differentiated.

Departments Involved

The development and ongoing improvement of IntelliEngage demands the unwavering commitment of diverse, multi-functional teams. From Personalisation and Digital to Frontline Coverage, Business, R&D, IT, Marketing, Risk, Fraud, Advisory, Behavioural Economics, and Finance, these departments serve as the driving forces behind the design, development, prototyping, and implementation of every iteration of the platform. The true brilliance of IntelliEngage isn't just its inherent intelligence; it's the power of this collaborative ecosystem, a testament to the multi-functional teams who continuously evolve and refine it.

State of competition

Recommendation engines exist in multitude within the markets we operate in; many financial services organizations have invested in conventional next-best-action (NBA) tools or recommendation systems in their applications. However, based on our research, the standard recommendation systems: • Were limited to simple, rule-based triggers and models, • Had limited ability as a client-first engagement system, • Included a level of standardized assumptions which limited the ability to learn from underlying data, • Made recommendations that were not always underpinned by “client needs”, and • Primarily focused on product cross-sell through direct engagements.

However, IntelliEngage represents a unique innovation in financial services, standing apart from typical recommendation systems and solves for the inherent limitations of market offerings.

In the 2024 Financial year, IntelliEngage had >2500 users, and catered for >10Mil clients across 12 countries in Africa. The platform enabled >6mil personalised conversations across >100 different use cases, and has a banker adoption rate of >80%. On a fully annualised basis, IntelliEngage achieved >40% conversion rate for sales-focused conversations, which resulted in >R2.2bn in revenue, >R20bn in assets, and >R30bn in liabilities.

IntelliEngage has also contributed to improved client experience across our markets in Africa, with an overall improvement of 5 points to the Private Banking NPS score in 2024.

Future Plans

Established as the strategic engagement platform and recommender system for our Personal and Private lines of business, exciting new capabilities that we are working on include: • Leveraging GenAI to create new features and capabilities on IntelliEngage, • Incorporating new data sources to increase the intelligence of our models (e.g. voice of customer data), • Embedding event streaming related data through real-time stream-in and stream-out capability, • Scaling to new business segments, geographies and client-direct platforms, and • Migration to cloud infrastructure to enable enhancements using cloud-based services.