Setu launches Sesame, India’s first LLM for BFSI sector

Setu, an Indian fintech company under the Pine Labs Group, introduced Sesame, India’s first Large Language Model (LLM) tailored for the banking, financial services, and insurance (BFSI) sector on Tuesday. Developed in partnership with ‘Sarvam AI’, an indigenous AI research firm, the company hailed this as a pivotal "ChatGPT moment" in financial services.

While highlighting the mission of Setu to democratise financial services, Nikhil Kumar, co-founder of Setu, states that they believe the potent fusion of the account aggregator framework and transformative technologies such as Large Language Models (LLMs) is crucial in turning their vision into 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,” Kumar adds.

He expresses excitement about developing significant, compliant, and responsible AI applications that highlight India's leadership in Applied AI, drawing parallels with pioneering innovations like Aadhaar and UPI that India has spearheaded.

Sesame taps into India's digital infrastructure-enabled data ecosystem to power various functionalities. These include enhanced credit underwriting, fraud detection, loan monitoring, upselling or cross-selling, and personalised financial advisory services.

Setu and Sarvam AI collaborated to make Sesame both domain-specific and region-specific by training it with custom data highly relevant to India’s BFSI sector. This entails integrating a domain-specific LLM with delivery models, enabling enterprise customers to leverage extensive financial data internally and externally in a compliant manner.

Setu aims to empower BFSI customers by integrating a domain-specific LLM with delivery models, enabling enterprise clients to leverage extensive financial data internally and externally in a compliant manner. This strategic approach is designed to facilitate smarter, quicker credit decisions and deliver highly personalised financial services throughout the customer's entire journey.

Pratyush Kumar, co-founder of Sarvam AI, states that Generative AI signifies a substantial shift in computational capabilities, where the value derived from one unit of computation has markedly increased. He cites their collaboration with Setu as an instance of leveraging this technology to generate value in the BFSI sector. “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,” Kumar adds.

The unveiling of Sesame occurred at Adbhut India, an event hosted by the non-profit People+ai, in the presence of notable figures like Nandan Nilekani (the Aadhaar architect and cofounder-cum-chairman of Infosys), Shankar Maruwada (co-founder and CEO of EkStep Foundation), Tanuj Bhojwani (head of People+ai), and other prominent figures from the fintech, AI, and digital public infrastructure realms, the company states in a release.