By Prince Osuagwu

Leading data & marketing technology company, Terragon Group, has created a Fireside where it hosts relevant stakeholders in the nation’s financial sector and other top Information and Communications Technology practitioners.

L-R: VP, Global Sales, EMEA, Terragon Group, Simon Curtis, MD, Nigeria Inter-Bank Settlement System (NIBSS), Adebisi Shonubi, CEO, Terragon Group, Elo Umeh and Chief Technology Officer Terragon Group, Ayodeji Balogun, at the Terragon Fireside Chat for Financial Service Institutions held at the Terragon Group Office in Lagos, recently

The latest fireside chat which happened last week in Lagos, was with the Managing Director, Nigeria Inter-Bank Settlement System (NIBSS), Mr Adebisi Shonubi, and top executives of financial institutions in Nigeria.

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Theme of the chat was “Transforming customer experience on digital channels through data science and artificial intelligence”.

The discussions centred on how banks and other financial institutions can use Data Analytics and Artificial Intelligence to close the Financial Inclusion gap.

Before the chat, Terragon CEO, Mr. Elo Umeh, had hosted the media, highlighting visions of the company and some of the intricate problems plaguing the Nigerian tech ecosystem which he hoped would burn out at the Fireside.

He unveiled an Artificial Intelligence enabled product cum solution tagged Adrenaline, which rides on the algorithms and behavioural patterns of mobile phone users to decipher the services they may likely wish to be rendered.

Umeh said that Terragon’s Adrenaline solution is right at the heart of banks digital transformation required to meet Nigeria’s financial inclusion target.

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He added that drawing on the advantages of mobile technology, messages can reach the last mile, as long as they have a mobile phone.

The Artificial Intelligence-enabled platform is able to deliver messages to audiences and draw real-time insights from customer feedback or behaviour; whilst also giving banks access to Terragon’s database of over 80million Nigerians, inclusive of Nigerians that are offline.

According to Umeh, “the solution not only takes cognisance of low literacy levels, which has been identified as an impediment in reaching the unserved, it uses audio and video formats to reach audiences that hitherto would have been difficult to reach”

At the fireside proper, Managing Director, NIBSS, Mr Adebisi Shonubi, declared that “recent discourse on financial inclusion stresses that homogeneity does not exist among financial service consumers. Thus, there is a need to properly identify, understand and predict the lifestyles, habits, and challenges of the target market to better inform product design, which would lead to better adoption”.

He admitted that Terragon’s Adrenaline makes this situation readily available to Financial Institutions and described it as “a timely development as we push towards closing the financial inclusion gap.”

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In a joint venture with leading telecommunication companies, Adrenaline delivers high impact, short audio and video messages in as little as five seconds via SMS. The key difference is that audio/video will render within the SMS environment without consuming the subscriber data or the need for a smartphone.

Other features of the solution include a 360 degree view of current and potential customers, allowing more accurate Customer Relationship Management (CRM) profiling, customised messaging leading to precision targeting, reduces wastage and increases conversion. With AI and data analytics embedded in the platform, banks and other financial institutions can create dynamic, custom products, offers and messaging for their different customer segments and prospects in unserved or underserved areas as they now have full visibility into customers’ psychographics.