Customer Story
How Rawbank brought always-on banking to 900,000+ customers on WhatsApp
Overview
Challenge: Call centers overloaded; customers demanded digital
Solution: Deploy AI chatbot on WhatsApp
Results: 900,000+ customers served
“Working with Sinch and Campfire has been a highly collaborative experience. Both teams are responsive, proactive, and committed to supporting our objectives, which makes it easy to innovate and continuously improve the solution.“
Operating since 2002, Rawbank is the Democratic Republic of the Congo’s largest universal bank.
As its customer base grew, so did support wait times and pressure on its call centers. At the same time, smartphone ownership rose quickly across the DRC, and demand for instant, digital-first interactions.
Fabrice Hainaut, Deputy Director Performances and Branches Network at Rawbank, saw where things were heading.
“We needed to modernize our customer support by offering instant, always-on banking services through a channel our customers already use daily. Traditional channels like call centers were becoming overloaded and less aligned with the growing demand for real-time, mobile-first interactions.”
More agents could absorb some of that load. But the underlying problem — customers wanting faster self-service answers around the clock — wasn’t going to go away.
Banking where customers already are
Rawbank partnered with Sinch and conversational AI agency Campfire to build Rawbot — a chatbot powered by Sinch Chatlayer across WhatsApp, web, and social media.
The WhatsApp chatbot has been particularly helpful as more customers shift from traditional banking channels to digital. Now, many customers are comfortable checking their sensitive bank information on WhatsApp instead of visiting branches.
Rawbot connects to the bank’s core systems through secure APIs, so customers get live account information without switching apps. Balance checks, mini-statements, fund transfers, card management, PDF account statements — all handled inside WhatsApp.
If a request falls outside what Rawbot can manage, it routes the conversation to a live agent, so no one gets stuck.
A branch in every pocket
The chatbot’s service menu is extensive:
- Balance and transaction history
- Debit and credit card activation and deactivation
- International SWIFT transfer tracking
- GPS-based branch and ATM lookups
- Direct access to account managers.
Because customers can do all of this securely 24/7 without a branch visit or phone call, Rawbot has lowered wait times and call center operational costs.
To put this into perspective, Rawbot handled more than 650,000 messages across over 220,000 conversations in just 30 days. And the chatbot had a 97% automated resolution rate, which gave human support agents more time to handle complex issues.
Rawbank now serves over 900,000 customers and is growing as more people shift from branch visits to WhatsApp for their day-to-day banking.
Consistently improving Rawbot’s performance with data
The team monitors Rawbot performance through Sinch Chatlayer’s analytics dashboard — tracking message volumes, NLP understanding rates, button interactions, and conversation outcomes. That data feeds directly into improvements to the bot’s flows and responses.
“Chatlayer enables us to automate a large volume of customer interactions, delivering instant and consistent responses,” Fabrice said. “It reduces dependency on manual support, improves operational efficiency, and ensures customers receive fast, reliable service at any time.”
Rawbank’s next step is to expand Rawbot’s capabilities — more advanced WhatsApp features, custom conversational flows, and a wider set of transactions the bot can complete without human involvement.
Rawbank At Sinch Awards 2026
Each year, Sinch hosts the Sinch Awards in Paris, France to recognize the most innovative customer use cases. Rawbank won the 2026 “Coup de cœur” (Jury’s Favorite Campaign”) category, thanks to the success of their Rawbot chatbot.
Check out the video below with Joel Syasi, Software Development Officer at Rawbank.
