IDFC FIRST Bank, Sarvam AI Partner to Build a Self-Improving Bank

IDFC FIRST Bank and AI company Sarvam AI have partnered to establish a joint R&D Lab to build banking systems that can learn from outcomes and improve over time.

The lab will work across frontier AI research, post-training, AI safety and security, with a focus on applying these technologies within a regulated banking environment.

Sarvam AI said the goal is to enable the bank to adopt new AI models and capabilities while retaining what its systems learn about customers, processes, policies and decisions.

“AI capabilities are advancing quickly, but making those capabilities useful in banking requires more than access to better models,” Sarvam AI said in a blog post.

The lab will combine IDFC FIRST Bank’s banking expertise with Sarvam’s AI research and engineering capabilities. It will test new models and techniques against banking use cases and use outcomes from those systems to improve subsequent versions.

The companies said that banking operations generate signals through customer interactions, decisions, human corrections, exceptions and eventual outcomes. The R&D lab will explore ways to use these signals as inputs for continuous model improvement.

The partnership will also focus on building infrastructure that can evaluate and adapt AI models using banking tasks, human feedback and real-world outcomes.

Sarvam AI described this as a “post-training factory” that can turn production experience into a source of learning, allowing AI systems to become more specific to the bank over time.

The lab will also work on AI safety and security, including evaluation, governance and controls. The systems will need to remain observable, auditable and controllable as their capabilities increase.

The research programme will explore new AI and large language model capabilities relevant to banking and financial services.

Alongside model development, the lab will study reliability, security, explainability and control, with these considerations built into the development process.

Sarvam AI said the approach would allow IDFC FIRST Bank to continue adopting new AI capabilities without rebuilding its systems every time the underlying technology changes.