Setu unveils Sesame, India's first domain-specific LLM for BFSI sector

Setu, a leading Indian fintech company and part of the Pine Labs Group, on Tuesday unveiled Sesame, India’s first Large Language Model (LLM) specifically designed for the banking, financial services, and insurance (BFSI) sector.

Developed in collaboration with indigenous AI research firm Sarvam AI, the company said this marks a "ChatGPT moment" in financial services. 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 chief executive officer of EkStep Foundation), Tanuj Bhojwani (head of People+ai), and other prominent figures in fintech, AI, and digital public infrastructure.

“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,” Kumar added.

Sesame leverages the rich data ecosystem enabled by India's digital infrastructure to power various features. These include improved credit underwriting, fraud detection, loan monitoring, upsell or 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 highly relevant to India’s BFSI sector. This includes combining a domain-specific LLM with delivery models. This allows 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. It also aims to provide hyper-personalised financial services to its customers across their entire lifecycle.

“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.