Al Masraf launches bilingual agentic AI for outbound sales calls
Al Masraf, the UAE-based Arab Bank for Investment and Foreign Trade, has deployed a bilingual agentic AI platform to handle outbound calling for prospective retail banking customers. The system operates in both English and Arabic, conducting what the bank describes as natural conversations rather than scripted prompts, and is configured to attempt initial contact with 90% of eligible enquiries within one business day.
The platform's first application covers prospective customers who have expressed interest in Al Masraf's salary transfer savings account. The AI agent independently identifies customer intent, handles common objections and captures qualification data before handing opportunities to human sales specialists. Final eligibility decisions, account approvals and fulfilment remain with the bank's existing processes, and customers are informed at the outset that they are speaking with a virtual agent.
How it works
The system is configured for eight calling hours per day, with four-minute call slots including inter-call intervals. Al Masraf's own planning assumptions translate this to approximately 120 call attempts per day, or around 2,640 over 22 working days. The bank was explicit that these figures represent capacity assumptions rather than achieved volumes, and that the 90% contact target measures attempted calls rather than successful connections. It intends to track outreach coverage, first-call resolution and qualification effectiveness to guide further development.
Ahmad Yousuf, Chief Retail Banking Officer at Al Masraf, said the capability helps the bank "capture requirements earlier, direct relevant opportunities to its specialists and give its teams more time to provide tailored advice and build lasting relationships."
Prashant Kumar, Head of Digital and AI at Al Masraf, noted that the agent moves "beyond the delivery of a scripted message" and that the bank is starting with a defined human handover process and appropriate controls as it evaluates future applications.
Market context
Agentic AI in financial services is attracting growing attention from both retail banks and insurers, with vendors including Salesforce, Microsoft and a range of specialist conversational-AI startups positioning voice and chat agents for outbound sales, collections and service triaging. Arabic-language natural-language processing has historically lagged English in commercial-grade deployments, making bilingual capability a meaningful differentiator in the Gulf Cooperation Council market, where customer preference for Arabic varies significantly by demographic and product type.
UAE regulators have been broadly supportive of AI adoption in banking, though the Central Bank of the UAE issued AI governance guidance in 2024 that requires financial institutions to maintain human oversight, customer disclosure and auditability for AI-driven interactions. Al Masraf's stated approach, disclosing the virtual-agent status to callers and keeping a manual handover to sales staff, appears consistent with that framework, though the bank has not cited a specific regulatory approval or certification for the platform.
The wider context is one of cost pressure and lead-conversion competition among UAE retail banks, several of which are investing in digital-first acquisition channels. By automating the highest-volume, lowest-complexity stage of the sales funnel, Al Masraf is positioning the platform as a means of improving conversion rates without proportional headcount growth. Whether the quality of AI-led qualification translates into measurable gains in funded accounts will be the key metric investors and peers will watch as the bank widens the platform to additional products.