Core solutions provider Technisys acquired the artificial intelligence (AI) powered chatbot provider Kona for an undisclosed sum Feb. 26,

Technisys, based in Miami, Fla., provides financial services solutions and a unified digital banking platform for 60 banks in the Americas, including the nearly $3 trillion HSBC, the $926 billion ScotiaBank, and the $359.6 billion Brazilian Itau Bank.

Technisys Chief Product Officer Ricardo Zuasti revealed the acquisition to Bank Automation News on Thursday, but did not disclose the financial details of the acquisition, citing the fact that both are private companies. Kona will bring natural language processing and intent analysis technology to the core provider.

The Uruguay-based Kona specializes in AI-powered virtual assistants and chatbots for banks, as well as a know your customer and anti-money laundering solution and video recognition services. Its technical underpinnings include machine learning, robot process automation, natural language processing and intent analysis, according to Zuasti. He said the Kona technology will allow Technisys to automate more complex interactions between customers and banks, thus reducing the banks’ operational footprint.

“By leveraging both a unified digital banking platform and a conversational digital channel on top of it, you can take the interactions of the bank with the customer to the next level,” Zuasti said. This provides the customer “with a very efficient and readily available interaction point that can guide the customer through problems that can provide both very simple but also complex,” he added.

“If you build into those automations, the ability to smartly hand off those interactions to humans — when the automation is not able to provide a good enough answer — you are basically merging the best of both worlds.”

Kona CEO and founder Diego Cibils said his team brings five years of conversational AI experience to Technisys. He declined to name any of Kona’s business partners.

“We feel it’s a great opportunity to provide digital channels, improved experiences,” Cibils said. “We are basically adding not only our products and our solutions and integrating those, but we’re adding our team know-how in how banks should interact with customers through AI.”

The future will likely hold more acquisitions in this space since AI is more technically accessible now than in the past, said Jost Hoppermann, an analyst with the  IT research firm Forrester.

“Off-the-shelf AI-powered banking apps are becoming highly attractive to smaller firms without large technology teams. AI will move from being something special to a core technology — and banks of all shapes and sizes will have AI-powered banking applications,” Hoppermann told BAN.

AI is one of the technologies Forrester considered when evaluating digital banking platforms in its last report, issued in September 2020. It ranked Technisys as a strong performer in the second-highest of four tiers, along with Oracle, TCS, Sopra Banking Software and Mambu. Competitors Temenos, Finastra and EdgeVerve, which the report specifically mentioned as leveraging AI, are ranked as leaders in the highest tier in the report.

Technisys has raised $64 million in three funding rounds, according to Crunchbase. Kona’s financial details are not publicly available.

Bank Automation Ignite, on April 13-14, is the event for inspiring automation initiatives and investment in financial services. At the virtual event, financial services professionals can discover new use cases and technologies that are accelerating automation in banking. Learn more and register at www.BankAutomationIgnite.com.

Editor’s Note: This article was updated March 15, at 10 a.m.