Pine Labs Group’s Setu, a leading Indian fintech company, has unveiled Sesame, India’s first Large Language Model (LLM) specifically designed for the BFSI sector.

Developed in collaboration with indigenous AI research firm Sarvam AI, the company said Sesame is a breakthrough that marks a “ChatGPT Moment” in the financial services space.

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

Sesame leverages India’s digital infrastructure to power features such as improved credit underwriting, fraud detection, loan monitoring, upsell/cross-sell, and personal finance advisory. The model is trained on custom data highly relevant to India’s BFSI sector, making it domain and region-specific.

Setu’s Co-founder, Nikhil Kumar, said, “At Setu, our mission is to democratise financial services. 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.”

Pratyush Kumar, Co-founder of Sarvam AI, 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. Our collaboration with Setu is an example of bringing this technology to create value in the BFSI space.”

The unveiling of Sesame marks a significant milestone in the development of AI-powered financial services in India. With Sesame, 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.

Sarvam AI is currently also working on a voice-based Indic LLM, which it plans to release in the upcoming months.