Pine Labs-owned Setu unveils LLM for banking and insurance services

Setu launches a ChatGPT-like service for financial services

Fintech firm Setu, which Pine Labs acquired in 2022, has unveiled a large language model (LLM) called 'Sesame' specifically designed for the Banking, Financial Services and Insurance (BFSI) sectors in collaboration with homegrown AI research firm Sarvam AI.

"This breakthrough marks a ChatGPT Moment in financial services...Sesame leverages the data ecosystem enabled by India's digital infrastructure to power features such as improved credit underwriting, fraud detection, loan monitoring, upsell/cross-sell and personal finance advisory," said Nikhil Kumar, Co-founder of Setu.

The unveiling took place at Adbhut India, an event organised by the non-profit People+ai on May 7.

Setu and Sarvam AI have together created Sesame to be both domain and region-specific, by training it on custom data that is highly relevant to India’s BFSI sector.

“Generative AI represents a significant step change in the nature of computation. What can be done with one rupee of compute is now dramatically more valuable," said Pratyush Kumar, Co-founder of Sarvam AI.

Sarvam was founded in July 2023 by Vivek Raghavan and Pratyush Kumar, who previously worked at Infosys co-founder Nandan Nilekani-backed AI4Bharat. Sarvam develops a full-stack offering for Generative AI, ranging from research-led innovations in training custom AI models to an enterprise-grade platform for authoring and deployment. Sarvam received around $41 million in funding from Lightspeed.

While showcasing the LLM, Kumar said that this domain-specific LLM with delivery models allow enterprise customers to harness the vast amounts of financial data available both internally and externally in a compliant manner.

"Setu’s vision is to empower BFSI customers to make smarter, faster credit decisions and provide hyper-personalised financial services to their customers across their entire lifecycle," he said.

Founded in 2018 by Sahil Kini and Nikhil Kumar, Setu is an application programming interface (API) infrastructure provider that offers services across bill payments, savings, credit and payments.

The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) has given the company the licence to operate as an account aggregator.

The Bengaluru-based firm, which was acquired by payments service provider Pine Labs for around $70 million in 2022, works closely with banks, insurance companies, lending firms, AMCs, other financial institutions for the financial architecture integrations.