Kasisto

Kasisto

Kasisto (a Backbase company) · Marketing · Chatbot

Kasisto is a banking-only AI platform whose KAI products power virtual assistants, agentic workflows and policy-grounded answers for banks and credit unions. Backbase acquired it in June 2026.

Interface preview of Kasisto

About Kasisto

What Is Kasisto

Kasisto is a banking AI platform built for one industry only. It started in 2013 as a spin-out of SRI International, the research lab behind Siri, and released KAI Banking in 2016 with Royal Bank of Canada and DBS Bank as early users. Today the company sells conversational AI for banks through four products: KAIgentic, KAI Answers, KAI-GPT and KAIops.

The scope is narrower than a general-purpose chatbot. A bank assistant has to check balances, explain card and loan terms, follow internal policy, show the document behind an answer, and pass the conversation to a person when a request gets messy. Kasisto builds for those constraints and does not chase other industries.

Ownership changed in 2026. Backbase closed the Kasisto acquisition on June 23, and by early October kasisto.com redirected to backbase.com. The product now sits inside Backbase's Banking OS, so most new buyers meet it through Backbase rather than as a standalone vendor.

The limits matter as much as the features. There is no public price list, no self-serve trial, and no path for a small team to test the platform without a sales cycle and an integration project.

Getting Started

  1. Contact Backbase or Kasisto sales and describe the channels you want to cover, since pricing is quoted per institution.
  2. Map the systems the assistant must reach, such as core banking, card processing, payments and the knowledge base that holds policy documents.
  3. Pick a starting scope, usually balance and card questions in the mobile app or a staff knowledge assistant behind the contact center.
  4. Connect identity, authentication and handoff rules so the virtual banking assistant can verify a customer and escalate to a human when confidence drops.
  5. Run a pilot with one channel and a defined success metric, then expand to voice, chat apps and agentic servicing tasks.

Product Information

A quick look at Kasisto's pricing, supported platforms, and performance.

Free PlanNo
Paid PlansNot published (custom quote)
PlatformWeb, iOS, Android, SMS, chat apps, voice
DeveloperKasisto (a Backbase company)
CategoryMarketing · Chatbot
Release DateJan 2013
Latest UpdatedJun 2026
Website Visits6.4K
Website Global Rank3.5M
API AvailabilityN/A

Best for

The users, tasks, and scenarios where this tool fits best.

Users

  • Digital banking teams at banks and credit unions
  • Contact center and service operations leaders
  • Compliance and risk teams
  • Front-line staff and branch employees

Tasks

  • Answering balance, transaction, card and loan questions inside a mobile app, website or messaging thread.
  • Looking up policy, procedure and product details with a citation the employee can check.
  • Resolving servicing requests such as address changes, card replacement and dispute intake through agentic workflows.
  • Triaging IT incidents with KAIops, which correlates telemetry and drafts a root-cause summary for bank operations teams.

Scenarios

  • Launching a branded assistant in a banking app
  • Handling a surge in service demand without adding headcount, using containment and self-service on common requests.
  • Deploying AI under regulatory scrutiny

Key features

KAIgentic Agent Orchestration

KAIgentic is the agentic AI platform at the center of the product. It splits a banking workflow across specialized agents instead of asking one model to handle everything, so a dispute, an account-opening question and a wealth inquiry can each run through a narrower set of instructions. A console shows agents, workflows and knowledge hubs, and gives staff a place to inspect and intervene. Kasisto launched it in early access in August 2025 and later integrated it with Microsoft Agent 365.

KAI Answers With Source Citations

KAI Answers is a generative search layer over the bank's policies, procedures, regulatory filings and product documents. It turns flat or tabular source material into a written answer and attaches a citation to the original passage. That citation is the useful part for a regulated business, because a reviewer can verify the claim instead of trusting the model. The same layer feeds answers to customer-facing assistants and to employees.

KAI-GPT Banking Model With Deployment Choice

KAI-GPT is Kasisto's banking-specific language model, launched in May 2023. Banks can use it inside KAIgentic or choose a general model, and the banking model can run in the institution's own cloud or on premises. That option matters to banks that cannot send customer data to a shared SaaS endpoint. Model choice is a per-deployment decision, not a single fixed stack.

Pre-Trained KAI Digital Assistants

Kasisto ships pre-trained assistants for consumer and business banking rather than an empty development kit. They cover common intents such as balances, transactions, cards, loans and branch details, and they run in mobile apps, websites, SMS, chat apps and voice channels. KAI Express, the 2021 cloud package, was designed to deploy in 30 days with a 90-day exit clause if the bank was not satisfied.

Policy and Compliance Controls

Every agent runs through pre-processing and post-processing layers that check the request against policy, flag possible hallucinations and score confidence before an answer goes out. If confidence falls below the threshold, the conversation moves to a human with the history attached. This is the part that separates agentic AI for financial services from a generic support bot, and it is also the part a bank must test against its own rules.

KAIops Incident Intelligence

KAIops is an operations layer that monitors system health, correlates telemetry and drafts root-cause analysis for IT incidents. It was announced in October 2025 and runs on top of KAIgentic. For a bank, the appeal is faster incident review without asking engineers to reconstruct a timeline by hand. It is a newer product than the customer-facing assistants, so production references are thinner.

Pros and cons

Pros

  • Built only for banking, with intents, policy controls and document grounding designed around financial services rather than adapted from general support software.
  • KAI Answers cites its sources, which supports the audit trail that compliance teams need before generated text reaches customers or staff.
  • Deployment flexibility: cloud by default, with KAI-GPT able to run in the bank's cloud or on premises.
  • Channel coverage across app, web, SMS, chat and voice, plus pre-trained banking assistants that shorten the first build.
  • Backbase ownership adds a larger banking software distribution channel and a wider Banking OS integration story.

Cons

  • No published pricing anywhere, so budgeting requires a full sales cycle and an itemized quote.
  • No self-serve trial or sandbox, which makes it hard for a smaller institution to judge fit before procurement.
  • The 2026 acquisition leaves roadmap and support continuity tied to Backbase's integration plan, and Kasisto's CEO transitioned out.
  • Integration work is substantial: core banking, identity, knowledge content and escalation rules all need to be connected before the assistant is useful.

Frequently asked questions

Kasisto gives banks and credit unions AI assistants that answer customer questions, complete servicing tasks and look up internal policy. Its products cover customer-facing chat and voice, employee knowledge search, agentic workflows and IT incident analysis.