As mobile banking adoption surges across Nigeria, users demand faster and simpler ways to manage their money, without switching apps or dealing with clunky interfaces. Xara, a new WhatsApp-based AI assistant, is promising to change that.
Xara, a multimodal artificial intelligence banking bot launched in June by Nigerian software engineer Sulaiman Adewale, allows people to send money, pay bills, and analyse spending as naturally as texting a friend. The bot is built entirely inside WhatsApp, used by 95% of Nigeria’s 31.6 million social media users.
“I wanted an easier way that carries everybody along in banking, and if you look at it properly, you will see that WhatsApp is what even the oldest people among us use,” Adewale told .
The product enters Nigeria’s crowded fintech space with a different approach: cut out the friction and build on top of what consumers already use. The company considers Owo, an AI managed by Mono and designed to facilitate payments on WhatsApp, as its closest competitor.
According to Adewale, Xara is powered by an existing large language model (LLM), the same underlying technology behind generative AI tools like ChatGPT. It is also trained on images and voices, especially accented Nigerian speech patterns, using open-source data tailored to its specific use case.
The AI understands commands in natural language, interprets them appropriately to confirm details, and processes the transaction in real time. “Send ₦10,000 to Abubakar for breakfast,” a user might chat this with the AI, and it will process.
“We have focused on just pidgin and English, but we are currently working on it to make it even understand our local languages like Hausa and Yoruba,” said Adewale.
To make the AI a personal financial assistant, users add their WhatsApp number, and once onboarded, they are linked to a payment source, currently 9 Payment Service Bank (9PSB), which issues user account numbers. Adewale said the team is working on partnering with more banks, so users can choose their preferred bank.
tested the AI bot for two weeks and found that it understands and can process transactions with images, voice notes, text, and can analyse user spending and schedule payments. It remembers conversions with users and is capable of saving recipients as beneficiaries.
About 10,000 users have been registered on the platform, and over ₦135 million ($88,200) worth of transactions have been recorded within the two weeks of its launch, Adewale claims. He added that his team is currently working on partnerships with other banks as its initial payment provider, 9PSB, could no longer handle the inflow of new users, causing it to pause new registrations
Stella Adeboye, a server at Kilimanjaro restaurant in Ilorin, said Xara could serve as an alternative for easy payment for customers who had to raise their heads multiple times to check account details on the wall to make transfers for bill payment.
“If this tool can take a picture of an account number and process the transfer instantly, I think it would help us and also make payments much easier for customers,” Adeboye said.
To its early users, how their personal and financial data are secured has been a major concern. “Being able to bank via WhatsApp without opening another app is convenient, since it works even on a low network connection,” said Babatunde Hassan, one of the users. “But I’m worried about how our information is secured, and I’m sure that doubt may also hold other people back.”
In response to how users’ data is secured, Adewale said that the AI is built to use WhatsApp’s existing end-to-end encryption to safeguard users’ data. This means that conversations are private and inaccessible to third parties. He also noted that it requires an optional 4-digit authentication PIN to authorise transactions to beat fraud or compromise accounts.
“We don’t retain those personal banking details ourselves; the only data we log is related to payment transactions, just for tracking and resolution purposes, if any issues arise,” he said. “For extra security, we advise users to lock their WhatsApp using Face ID or a password, or even lock their chats with the AI to keep transactions private.”
Adewale explained that in case of a WhatsApp account breach or lost phone, users can visit its customer support to “request that your account be blocked instantly.” Accounts can be reinstated once identification is provided.
When asked about the type of licensing governing their multimodal AI service, Adewale stated that they currently “rely on banking partners’ license” for regulatory cover, indicating functions through existing compliance frameworks held by its financial institution partners.
A game changer for financial inclusion?
According to the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN), over 28 million Nigerians lack access to financial products and services, including money transfer services, despite the country’s financial exclusion rate dropping from 46.3% in 2010 to around 26% in 2023.
Financial analyst Victor Daniel said leveraging WhatsApp for banking services could encourage even further financial inclusion, especially since the platform works on low-end smartphones despite poor network connections.
“In the past years, fintech innovations have helped reduce the financial exclusion in the country, but we need more innovations like this that can give us more alternatives to traditional systems to achieve more financial inclusion,” he said.
Daniel added that tools like Xara may also offer a strong alternative to QR code payments, which have seen limited adoption in Nigeria due to technical know-how and fraud concerns. “By allowing users to simply snap an account number from a note or screen and initiate a transfer through natural language, that provides a simpler payment service.”
While the focus is currently on Nigeria, Adewale said he envisions Xara AI banking assistant reaching more African countries where WhatsApp is dominant and banking remains a challenge. He also bets that the tool will disrupt the fintech landscape and “replace a lot of fintechs, hopefully.”
“We are still working on integrating additional services like savings plans, utility payment, and even e-commerce and logistics, like telling it to order food for you, and it will still do.”
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