Pine Labs-owned Setu unveils India's first domain-specific LLM for BFSI sector

Fintech firm Pine Labs-owned Setu recently unveiled India's first large language model (LLM), specifically designed for the BFSI sector.

The company has named this LLM 'Sesame', which was developed in collaboration with Bengaluru-based generative AI (GenAI) startup Sarvam AI.

In December 2023, Sarvam AI raised $41 million in a Series A funding round led by Lightspeed, with participation from Peak XV Partners and Khosla Ventures.

Unveiled at Adbhut India event

The unveiling took place at Adbhut India, an event organised by the non-profit People+ai, in the presence of Nandan Nilekani (Co-founder and director of EkStep Foundation), Shankar Maruwada (Co-founder and CEO of EkStep Foundation), Tanuj Bhojwani (Head of People+ai), and other prominent figures from fintech, AI, and digital public infrastructure.

What does 'Sesame' do?

Sesame leverages the rich 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.

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.

They have combined this domain-specific LLM with delivery models that allows enterprise customers to harness the vast amounts of financial data available both internally and externally in a compliant manner.

Setu aims to empower BFSI customers to make smarter, faster credit decisions and provide hyper-personalised financial services to their customers across their entire lifecycle.

Leadership comments

“At Setu, our mission is to democratise financial services," said Nikhil Kumar, Co-founder of Setu.

"We believe that the powerful combination of the Account Aggregator framework and transformative technologies like Large Language Models (LLMs) is the key to making this a reality. Just as India has led the way with groundbreaking innovations like Aadhaar and UPI, we are excited to build meaningful, compliant, and responsible AI applications that showcase India's leadership in Applied AI,” added Nikhil Kumar.

“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.

"Our collaboration with Setu is an example of bringing this technology to create value in the BFSI space. 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,” he added.