Smart Communications acquires Pendula to boost AI in customer chat
Smart Communications has announced the acquisition of Pendula, an Australian company specialising in intelligent orchestration and digital delivery technology, to support enterprises in heavily regulated sectors to enhance customer interactions across digital channels.
The move expands Smart Communications' Conversation Cloud platform by incorporating Pendula's orchestration capabilities and artificial intelligence tools, enabling regulated organisations to deliver communications to customers through SMS, email, WhatsApp, and RCS.
Meeting rising customer expectations
Organisations operating in financial services, insurance, and healthcare face rising pressure to provide faster and more personalised customer communication across an increasing range of channels. According to Smart Communications' State of Customer Conversations report, only 54% of customers express satisfaction with the omnichannel experiences offered by their providers - a figure that has decreased year after year.
This declining satisfaction points to a gap between the experiences customers anticipate and what enterprises can deliver. Many organisations still depend on fragmented systems and manual interventions, resulting in incomplete transactions, missed outcomes, and weakening trust from customers.
Expanded AI and orchestration capabilities
By acquiring Pendula, Smart Communications aims to address these challenges through expanded orchestration and AI capabilities. The integration of Pendula's technologies is intended to reduce friction in communications, improve completion rates, and strengthen engagement with customers across preferred digital channels.
"For Smart Communications, the future has always been about enabling smarter, more meaningful experiences with customers," said Leigh Segall, CEO of Smart Communications. "The acquisition of Pendula is the natural next step in our evolution, solving a key challenge our clients face: orchestrating and completing complex, high-value customer interactions across digital channels, at scale. It also strengthens the AI capabilities already embedded into the Conversation Cloud – enhancing decisioning, automation, and personalisation to help our customers engage more intelligently and drive better outcomes across every touchpoint. "
Pendula's Intelligence Suite integration
Pendula's Intelligence Suite will become part of the Conversation Cloud, providing analytics, AI-driven decisioning, and configurable AI agents that operate within workflow guardrails and organisational compliance requirements. This suite enables features such as trend analysis, forecasting of customer needs, personalised automated responses, and seamless transfers to human representatives, turning data into actionable insights.
The orchestration technology includes intelligent failover, meaning that if a message does not reach a customer via one channel, it is automatically redirected to the next most effective channel. This approach increases completion rates and reduces the need for manual follow-up. The system's decisioning logic can automatically guide customers towards their desired outcomes, including responding or redirecting based on natural language inputs, and offers pre-built integrations for enterprise systems such as Salesforce, AWS, Snowflake, Zendesk, and Stripe.
Serving regulated sectors
Smart Communications states that the expanded platform will help organisations in sectors where compliance is stringent and efficiency is critical. The integration of Pendula's capabilities brings enterprise-grade orchestration and security standards, designed to ensure that communications are secure, connected, and compliant.
"At Pendula, we've always believed that today's customers want real conversations, not one-way broadcasts," said Alex Colvin, CEO of Pendula. "By joining Smart Communications, we are combining our orchestration expertise with the global reach and proven capabilities of the Conversation CloudTM platform. Together, we will help enterprises move faster, connect more intelligently, and deliver personalised experiences that drive action at scale."
The combination of technologies brings together Pendula's established presence with brands including Shippit, University of London, Origin Energy, and Amaysim, and Smart Communications' platform, which serves over 700 enterprises globally. Smart Communications reports that its platform facilitates over 60 billion mission-critical customer conversations annually.
Pendula's technology will continue to operate under the Conversation Cloud platform, with ongoing focus on security, compliance, and customer-centric orchestration for regulated markets. The capabilities gained through this acquisition will be available to existing and new clients of both companies, providing access to advanced orchestration, analytics, and AI-driven engagement tools through Smart Communications' integrated offering.
