Meet Sesame, India’s First BFSI-Specific LLM

Setu, a leading Indian fintech company and part of the Pine Labs Group has introduced “Sesame,” India’s first Large Language Model (LLM) specifically designed for the banking, financial services, and insurance (BFSI) sectors.

The model has been developed in collaboration with a domestic AI research firm, Sarvam AI. A company spokesperson mentioned the development as a “ChatGPT moment” in financial services.

The LLM leverages the rich data ecosystem powered by India’s digital infrastructure to enhance various functions, including credit underwriting, fraud detection, loan monitoring, upsell or cross-sell, and personal finance advisory.

Further, the model is designed to be both domain- and region-specific, and it has been trained on custom data particularly relevant for India's BFSI sector. This includes combining a domain-specific LLM with delivery models.

This combination enables enterprise customers to utilize massive financial data while maintaining internal and external compliance, according to Setu.

Through Sesame, the fintech company envisions empowering BFSI customers to make smarter and swifter credit decisions. Moreover, the company aims to provide highly personalized financial services to its customers throughout their lifecycle.

“At Setu, our mission is to democratize 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,” Kumar added.

“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 that we believe can be repeated across sectors where India has created foundational digital public goods,” Kumar added.

The LLM was unveiled at ‘Adbhut India'—an event organized by the non-profit People+AI in the presence of prominent dignitaries from fintech, AI, and digital public infrastructure.