Egyptian Cairo-based startup Intella, the market leader in dialectal Arabic speech intelligence, has entered into a landmark partnership with Visa, the global payments technology giant, to reshape the future of conversational AI for financial institutions in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA).
The deal aims to bridge one of the biggest technology gaps in the region: the inability of generic AI systems to accurately process Arabic’s diverse dialects.
“This is a pivotal moment,” said Nour AlTaher, Intella’s co-founder and CEO. “Visa’s partnership with Intella validates our foundational belief: true understanding of the Arab world cannot be an afterthought, it must be at the core of the technology.
“We are not just providing a tool; we are unlocking the real voice of the customer for the entire regional banking ecosystem.”
What Intella Does
Founded in 2021 by Nour AlTaher and Omar Mansour, Intella has quickly established itself as the leading Arabic-first artificial intelligence company, focusing on developing solutions for enterprise-level contact centres and banks.
Its proprietary models include a dialectal automatic speech recognition (ASR) engine and Ziila, a conversational AI agent capable of processing natural customer speech across the Arab world’s fragmented linguistic landscape.
The uniqueness of Intella lies in its dialectal precision. While most AI platforms are designed for Modern Standard Arabic (MSA), the formal version of the language often used in news and government documents, Intella builds tools for the everyday dialects spoken across cities, towns, and villages.
From Egyptian and Gulf Arabic to Levantine and Maghrebi dialects, the system is trained to capture cultural and linguistic nuances.
This means banks can move beyond analyzing only a small random sample of calls, which is industry practice today, to achieving 100% coverage of customer conversations.
This complete analysis helps improve agent performance, ensure regulatory compliance, and reveal untapped insights into customer expectations and frustrations.
Intella’s Funding and Expansion Capacity
Intella recently raised US$12.5 million in Series A funding in a round that was oversubscribed, showcasing strong investor appetite for regional AI solutions. The round is among the largest for an AI startup in North Africa and is earmarked for expanding research, scaling operations, and entering new MENA markets.
The capital infusion will also support the development of more industry-specific AI products tailored for banking, telecoms, and government institutions. Intella’s growth strategy places it in a unique position as the only AI company in MENA fully specializing in Arabic dialects.
This is significant given that the global AI market is expected to reach US$1.35 trillion by 2030 (Statista), with PwC projecting that the MENA region alone could capture US$320 billion in economic gains from AI adoption.
Intella’s ability to provide a localized, culturally relevant alternative to Western-built models makes it an attractive player in this market.
Why Visa is On Board
Visa’s involvement goes far beyond a typical tech partnership. Through its Visa Consulting & Analytics division, the company will work closely with Intella to design tools that help banks extract value from conversational data.
Meanwhile, Visa Implementation Services will oversee deployment across its partner financial institutions in the region.
The immediate benefit comes from integrating intellaCX, a platform that transforms customer calls into strategic business intelligence.
For instance, banks will be able to detect recurring complaints about loan processes, measure agent response quality in real time, and even discover demand trends for financial products.
In the next phase, Visa aims to roll out Ziila, Intella’s advanced conversational AI agent, which can serve as a virtual assistant for customers.
By handling routine queries, such as balance checks, card issues, or payment disputes, in natural dialectal Arabic, Ziila is expected to reduce wait times, cut costs for banks, and raise customer satisfaction.
“This collaboration is more than technology integration,” said Basma Berti, Vice President for Visa Consulting & Analytics. “It is a shared commitment to building the next generation of Arabic conversational AI that reflects the aspirations of our partners across the region.”
Bridging the AI “Intelligence Gap”
The partnership comes at a time when the Arab world faces what experts call an AI intelligence gap. Despite the region’s large population of over 400 million Arabic speakers, most mainstream AI models still focus on English and a few dominant global languages.
The result is a mismatch: AI systems often misinterpret Arabic dialects, which directly affects customer experience. According to IDC research, misunderstanding in Arabic leads to 35% lower customer satisfaction scores compared with English-language AI systems.
Furthermore, because banks typically analyse just 2–5% of recorded calls, most valuable data is lost, preventing businesses from spotting service failures early.
Intella’s system is engineered to close this gap by analysing 100% of conversations with high dialectal accuracy. This turns previously ignored or misinterpreted data into actionable insights, enabling banks to predict customer needs and prevent churn.
Why This Matters
The financial sector in MENA is undergoing a rapid transformation. EY’s Global Banking Study (2024) reports that 68% of customers in the region are willing to switch banks after a single poor service experience, compared to a global average of 55%.
This makes customer experience one of the most critical battlegrounds for banks. By enabling proactive and predictive customer service, Intella’s tools allow financial institutions to stay ahead of customer frustrations, design better products, and strengthen regulatory compliance.
In practical terms, this could mean faster loan approvals, better fraud detection through conversation analysis, and reduced customer attrition.
As AlTaher puts it: “We are unlocking the real voice of the customer. For the first time, banks can hear not just what their customers are saying, but why they are saying it, and act before issues escalate.”
The Intella-Visa partnership is therefore more than just a commercial arrangement; it represents a strategic focus on the future of Arabic AI, potentially reshaping customer service standards for millions across the Middle East and North Africa.
Talking Point
The Intella–Visa partnership strikes me as a game-changing move that finally puts Arabic speakers at the centre of global AI innovation, rather than treating them as an afterthought.
For too long, customer service in the region is claimed to have been undermined by generic tools that fail to capture the richness of Arabic dialects, leaving banks blind to what their customers are truly saying.
By combining Visa’s global reach with Intella’s dialect-focused AI, this collaboration has the potential to set a new gold standard for customer engagement in MENA’s financial sector.
What stands out most is not just the technology, but the shift in mindset, it signals that local languages and cultures deserve dedicated solutions, not recycled global models. If executed effectively, this could be the blueprint for how AI adapts to diverse societies worldwide.
