GenAI Can Help Fintech Sector Comply With Evolving Regulations, Say Experts

At a time when the country’s fintech sector is under the scrutiny of the Reserve Bank of India (RBI), experts believe this provides opportunities for startups focussed on generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) to develop solutions to help fintech startups comply with the regulations.

During a panel discussion on the topic, “How GenAI Will Shake up Indian Fintech Products?”, at Inc42’s The GenAI Summit, speakers discussed a slew of topics, including use cases of GenAI in fraud detection, consumer data privacy, customer services efficiency, and bank statement analysis.   

While much of the discussion revolved around the  changing regulatory landscape in financial services industry of India, Hyperface Technologies COO Aishwarya Jaishankar said that building technology for regulatory compliance is a big opportunity.  

“As a financial services provider, being complaint should be in your DNA. On top of that, building technology to improve efficiency can be done,” Jaishankar said.

She said if a AI-focussed startup is able to provide solutions that can ease compliance, then banks will be willing to use such solutions. 

Talking about the ways banks are leveraging AI, Open Financial Technologies cofounder and CEO Anish Achuthan said that while banks traditionally used AI voice assistants for customer facing processes, they are increasingly using the technology for other functions as well.

“However, now AI models are being used to improve efficiencies across lending operations, bringing multiple systems as ERP, financial systems, and human resources together with the banks. Corporates on the other hand will also leverage AI models to improve financial accounting challenges like bank statement reading, among others,” Achuthan said.

Fintech SaaS unicorn Perfios’ CTO Sumit Nigam said AI can also assist banks in improving financial inclusion. “We are talking about the huge data repositories which are getting ready with digital public infrastructure and ONDC. The same data can be used to underwrite loans to the unbanked population with use of compliant AI tools,” he said.

The panelists opined that banks and other financial services institutions should not be building in-house AI technology currently as it is evolving rapidly. They said that these institutions should rather outsource the task of developing such technologies.

Jaishankar said that startups providing GenAI solutions to enterprises will have to create separate products for different industries as the issues and challenges are different for every sector. 

“I don’t think that a generalised LLM model will be much in demand. For instance, SME  loan frauds can be different from the challenges faced by retail company when they deal with banks. Hence, the need is for precise targeted AI models to attract banks and other financial institutions,” Jaishankar said.

It is pertinent to note that banks as well as fintech startups are leveraging GenAI to offer personalised experience, underwriting insurance, improving customer processes, among others.

Presented by Inc42 and Microsoft, co-presented by Invideo and QX Lab AI and supported by partners such as Venture Catalysts, Google Cloud, Mobavenue, MongoDB, and Peak XV, The GenAI Summit took place in Bengaluru on April 3rd.