Smart Communications has acquired Pendula, a provider of intelligent orchestration and digital delivery technology, integrating Pendula’s Intelligence Suite into its Conversation Cloud™ to enhance AI capabilities for personalized customer conversations in highly regulated sectors.
Today’s customers expect faster, smarter interactions across various channels, placing pressure on enterprises to automate timely, personalized, and multi-channel conversations. Smart Communications’ recent State of Customer Conversations report revealed that only 54% of customers are satisfied with omnichannel experiences from financial services, insurance, and healthcare providers, a year-over-year decline. This growing dissatisfaction stems from fragmented systems and manual follow-ups, leading to incomplete transactions and lost trust.
The acquisition of Pendula addresses these challenges by expanding the Conversation Cloud™ platform with intelligent orchestration. This integration is designed to reduce friction, increase completion rates, and extend engagement across high-performing digital channels such as SMS, email, WhatsApp, and RCS, enabling regulated enterprises to connect with customers and drive action.
Leigh Segall, CEO of Smart Communications, stated, “For Smart Communications, the future has always been about enabling smarter, more meaningful experiences with customers. 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 personalization to help our customers engage more intelligently and drive better outcomes across every touchpoint.”
The integration of Pendula’s Intelligence Suite into the Conversation Cloud™ introduces new AI capabilities for smarter, faster, and more personalized conversations. The suite includes analytics, AI decisioning, and configurable AI agents that operate within precise workflows and guardrails, ensuring alignment with organizational brand, goals, and compliance requirements. This AI-powered layer aims to help enterprises convert data into action and deepen engagement across all channels, from identifying trends and forecasting customer needs to delivering personalized responses and seamless handoffs to human experts.
Pendula’s orchestration technology features intelligent failover capabilities, automatically rerouting messages to the next best channel if initial delivery fails, which increases completion rates and reduces manual effort. Decisioning logic can be configured to guide customers to desired outcomes and automate responses or redirects based on natural language inputs. The solution offers seamless integration across the Conversation Cloud platform and includes pre-built connectors for enterprise systems such as Salesforce, AWS, Snowflake, Zendesk, and Stripe.
This acquisition strengthens Smart Communications’ capacity to serve complex needs in highly regulated industries, where customer attention is limited, compliance is non-negotiable, and operational efficiency is crucial. Pendula’s technology extends the Conversation Cloud™ with enterprise-grade orchestration, helping organizations improve completion rates, reduce manual effort, and ensure secure, compliant, and cross-channel interactions. Pendula technology adheres to high standards for security and compliance, mirroring all Conversation Cloud™ solutions.
Alex Colvin, CEO of Pendula, commented, “At Pendula, we’ve always believed that today’s customers want real conversations, not one-way broadcasts. By joining Smart Communications, we are combining our orchestration expertise with the global reach and proven capabilities of the Conversation Cloud™ platform. Together, we will help enterprises move faster, connect more intelligently, and deliver personalized experiences that drive action at scale.”
Smart Communications specializes in modernizing processes for regulated enterprises to facilitate customer interactions. Its Conversation Cloud™ platform supports compliant, digital-first experiences through omnichannel communications, intelligent orchestration, secure data capture, and digital archival. Over 700 enterprises globally, including Zurich Insurance, Priority Health, The Pacific Financial Group, and The Bancorp, utilize Smart Communications to mitigate compliance risk, enhance operational efficiency, reduce costs, and accelerate digital transformation. Cinven, a global private equity firm, acquired the company in 2025 to foster international expansion and scale its platform in regulated markets. Smart Communications integrates with enterprise systems like Salesforce, AWS, Guidewire, DuckCreek, OneSpan, and Pega via over 30 pre-built connectors, powering more than 60 billion customer conversations annually.
Pendula, founded in 2017, is a customer engagement solution provider known for its innovative solutions that boost engagement, reduce churn, and maximize customer lifetime value for brands such as Shippit, University of London, Origin Energy, and Amaysim. Pendula is committed to security, efficiency, and customer success, serving as a partner for companies seeking to improve customer conversations.
