Azilen, EFT host Africa banking forum on AI and payments

Azilen Technologies and EFT Corporation convened African banking leaders in Harare to discuss how AI could reshape customer service, compliance and payments. The forum focused on Voice AI, Agentic AI and transaction data as banks look for faster, more connected operations.

Why it matters: - African banks are moving from basic automation to AI systems that can improve customer experience, risk decisions and payment intelligence. - Zimbabwe's mobile-first market and growing digital transaction volume make AI-driven banking tools especially relevant. - The forum framed compliance and transaction data as sources of competitive advantage, not just operational overhead.

What happened: - Azilen Technologies and EFT Corporation hosted an exclusive leadership session in Harare, Zimbabwe, bringing together banking leaders from across Africa. - The discussion focused on the next era of AI banking and how financial institutions can extract more value from customer interactions, regulation and transaction data. - The session also explored how banks can connect customer engagement, compliance and payments through a single system of action.

The details: - Participants discussed Voice AI as a customer service tool for Zimbabwe's young, mobile-first population. - Zimbabwe has a median age of 18.1 years, nearly 46% of the population between 10 and 35 years old, and 16.02 million mobile connections nationwide. - Internet penetration in Zimbabwe stands at 38.4%, which makes voice-based support more practical than smartphone-only or broadband-dependent experiences. - Industry data shared at the session said AI-handled calls cost $0.30 to $0.50 each, can resolve up to 85% of customer queries and can deliver a projected three-year ROI of 331% to 391%. - The forum also pointed to a forecast that conversational AI could generate $80 billion in global labor savings by 2026. - On compliance, participants examined how Agentic AI can support risk management with audit trails, human-in-the-loop approvals, role-based access controls and explainable decision-making. - On payments, Zimbabwe's National Payment System processed 234.7 million electronic transactions worth ZiG 612 billion in the first quarter of 2026. - More than 10.96 million active mobile financial services subscribers supported that payments activity. - The discussion said banks should focus less on processing more transactions and more on extracting intelligence from existing transaction streams. - The use cases discussed included merchant behavior analysis, customer lifecycle identification, fraud and AML detection, dispute pattern analysis, cross-sell decisions and collections decisions. - The architecture described included Azeon for decision orchestration, Rootle for voice, EFT Rails for payment infrastructure and a modular KYC pipeline for document verification, biometric matching, liveness detection, watchlist screening and ongoing monitoring. - The shared foundation was described as reusable across product lines and designed for Zimbabwe's regulatory environment.

Between the lines: - The event showed how African banks are trying to link front-end customer service, back-office compliance and payment infrastructure instead of treating them as separate projects. - Voice AI stands out because it can reach customers in markets where internet access is still limited. - The emphasis on explainability and auditability suggests banks want AI adoption without losing regulatory control. - The modular platform approach points to a push for faster deployment and lower duplication across banking products.

What's next: - Azilen and EFT Corporation signaled that AI will become a core part of future banking operations across Africa. - Banks are likely to keep exploring connected systems that turn data, decisions and customer interactions into continuous intelligence. - The companies positioned their combined stack as a foundation for banks that want to move faster while maintaining oversight and compliance.

The bottom line: - The forum's message was clear: the next phase of African banking is not just digital payments or chatbots, but tightly connected AI systems that can improve service, compliance and revenue at the same time.