Pine Labs-owned Setu launches LLM for financial services

Fintech player Pine Labs-owned API platform Setu has developed India's first domain-specific Large Language Model (LLM) for the banking, financial services, and insurance (BFSI) sectors.

Called Sesame, the LLM has been developed in collaboration with Sarvam AI, an indigenous AI research firm specialising in creating innovative and tailored AI solutions for various industries.

The model was launched at the People+AI event held at Bangalore International Centre (BIC) in the presence of industry experts including Infosys Co-founder Nandan Nilekani and Shankar Maruwada, CEO and Co-founder of the non-profit EkStep Foundation.  

“We don’t make financial decisions by talking to our banker in our real life, but what if we could?” said Nikhil Kumar, Co-founder of Setu, before unveiling Sesame. The model aims to enable BFSI users to make smarter and faster credit decisions and provide hyper-personalised financial services across their entire lifecycle.

Sesame's goal is to address what Kumar refers to as one of the biggest problems facing India—credit.

It allows enterprise customers to navigate, use, and tap into the vast amounts of financial data available both internally and externally in a compliant manner. The model uses a data-rich ecosystem backed by India's thriving digital infrastructure to provide improved credit underwriting, fraud detection, loan monitoring, upsell/cross-sell, and personal finance advisory. 

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Kumar also showed a real-life use case of the model during a live demonstration at the event. He connected a user’s bank account details using an account aggregator, and after due user permissions, was able to answer questions like 'What does my financial health look like?' and 'Which AC would be under my budget?'

The model was able to pick up smaller filters of credit card discounts, the fastest delivery, and even the closest outlet ending the conversation with a payment link. 

“We showed that we can significantly increase the accuracy of identifying insights from financial statements. This is a template which we believe can be repeated across sectors where India has created foundational digital public goods,” said Pratyush Kumar, Co-founder, Sarvam AI.

Co-founded by Nikhil Kumar and Sahil Kini in 2018, Setu essentially provides developers with modular APIs that allow them to build financial products for the specific needs of its users. The startup was acquired by Pine Labs in June 2022 in a deal reportedly worth $70 million.