Capitec unveils ‘first’ real-time AI support

Fast-rising South African bank Capitec last week unveiled Pulse, an innovative AI capability that it says fundamentally changes how clients experience support through its contact centre.

For the first time, clients are assisted by contact centre agents who already know what issues to address at every interaction. This eliminates the frustration clients can feel when needing to explain an issue from scratch at exactly the moment when clarity and speed matter most.

Capitec’s claims to the tool being a world-first have been disputed on the basis that there are many AI-driven real-time customer support solutions. However, according to Andrew Baker, chief information officer of Capitec, the claim relates to more than the superficial capabilities of those platforms.

“It is a claim about delivering real time situational understanding at the moment a call is received, built entirely on live operational data rather than batch replicated summaries, without impacting the bank’s production transaction processing,” he writes in his blog. “That specificity is what the coverage largely missed, and it is worth unpacking in detail, because the reason no comparable system exists is not that nobody thought of it. It is that the engineering path to deploying it safely is extremely narrow, and it requires a degree of control over the underlying data architecture that almost no bank in the world currently possesses.”

Pulse is an AI-enabled tool, triggered when a client contacts the support call centre through the Capitec app. Its power lies in the contextual information it gives about a client’s situation in real time as they make contact. Drawing on signals across Capitec’s systems, Pulse gives agents an immediate, accurate picture before a single question is asked. The result is a faster, calmer, and more human experience precisely when clients need help.

“Pulse is a world first because for the first time, real-time support begins with understanding rather than interrogation,” says Baker. “Faster resolution is part of it, but what we are really solving for is delivering an effortless experience for our clients when they are feeling the most frustrated.”

Removing friction 

When something goes wrong, the last thing clients need is to have to repeat themselves. Yet traditional call centre support often begins with a series of questions: Who are you? What happened? When did it start? Those first few minutes can feel slow and frustrating, especially when a transaction has been declined, a service is disrupted, or an account query is urgent. Capitec says Pulse removes that friction by ensuring agents already understand the client’s situation before the conversation begins.

Rather than needing to stitch information together during a call, Pulse brings it together so that agents already have the context when the call begins. In practice, that means an agent has information ready about what the client has experienced (whether a declined transaction, service disruption, or a query around account limits) and how best to help them. This way, clients spend less time explaining and more time getting the support they need.

Testing data over three months shows the tool’s impact on client support efficiency. Without Pulse, agents in the testing group took approximately 7% more time to resolve issues compared to the all-agent average for our Client Care Centre. Once this group started using Pulse, they reduced their call handling times by up to 18%, a net performance improvement of 26%. This means faster resolution, fewer repeated explanations, and a support experience that reflects the quality clients expect.

“These results show that when you remove friction at the start of an interaction, everything changes,” says Baker. “Clients feel heard from the outset, and agents can focus on what they are there to do: solve the problem.”

Designed to protect

Capitec says the Pulse tool was built with a clear principle: that more precise intelligence about a client’s situation should translate directly into a better experience for that client. Every design decision reflects that commitment.

Pulse activates only when a client contacts Capitec for support, and only during that interaction. It analyses limited data necessary to diagnose and help resolve a specific issue. The tool is event-triggered, time-limited, and used exclusively during active support interactions to resolve problems safely while protecting clients. 

“The result is an innovative tool that ensures that when a client needs help, Capitec is prepared and already in a position to provide it,” says Baker.