Srikanth Nadhamuni has his fingers in many pies. He is the CEO of Bangalore-based incubator Khosla Labs, which he co-founded with Vinod Khosla. Nadhamuni was a non-executive director on the HDFC Board before resigning in February last year. He is also the co-founder and chairman at Trustt, a SaaS cloud-based banking provider, formerly known as Novopay Banking. 

Origins of Trustt

After his stint as the CTO of AADHAR, Nadhamuni set his eyes upon the banking sector. “The existing technology for banking was very antiquated.

They were still using 30-year old technologies, relational databases and only a few APIs that were supported by the older CDS (Customs Decisions System). The demand for new platforms for banking products and services increased especially as the usage of mobile phones exploded in India,” he stated.

GPT-Suite Launch

Seven years ago, Nadhamuni’s company set about building Trustt to deliver banking services enmeshed with new-age technologies like AI. 

Now, with the widespread arrival of ChatGPT, Trustt has announced a GPT product suite for banks which is generating excitement and justifiably so. 

Nadhamuni recalls how the banking sector moved in his childhood. “Things used to be very different when I was a kid. When I was 12, my mother took me to a small branch of Andhra Bank in Mysore to open the kiddies account as it was called. 

I remember knowing the people who were working in the bank then and I could talk to the cashier or the bank manager. Ofcourse we can’t afford to deliver this kind of service to 1.2 billion people. But the shift to digital has brought a certain distance between the banker and the customer. We have lost the concept of a bank being a friendly entity,” he said. 

Since ChatGPT’s arrival, Nadhamuni has been wondering whether we can bring back the old way of banking where it’s very personalised. “Can you imagine if you had a friend sitting with you in your room just chatting and telling you about the products and how to go about getting these products. It’s as if everybody had their own friend at the bank that you could really trust. That’s what we were aiming for with these products,” he explained. 

Trustt has three products currently as a part of the GPT-suite. It built a curated corpus based specifically on their customers. In short, it works exactly the way the bank wants it to within the real product. 

“Firstly, the user should be able to just pick up the phone and ask in any language you want, Bengali or Tamil or Hindi using the most colloquial terms and the chatbot should be able to respond in the same tone. Today, we cover some 12 languages,” Nadhamuni said. 

“Even aside from the standard FAQs which are very static, there are several subsequent questions like ‘Can I ask you how long the loan will take to get there? What is the limit?’ 

Nadhamuni added that customer service still remains the biggest challenge for customer service. “LLMs will be able to know the entire customer history and understand the context when they respond and deliver as per the expectations of the customer. For a human being to go through all the older interactions is very difficult and just as time-taking,” he stated. 

“Our third product was if I’m driving my car on the way somewhere and I want to repay this month’s EMI or I want to complete the authentication process for a loan,” he continued. 

Nadhamuni believes that these products will transform the banking sector. “Clients are very excited about these offerings. The CEO of the company, Gautam is in Bombay at the moment talking to 15 banks who are in conversation with us about the products. And it is a big deal! Somebody other than humans can understand language now!” he explained. 

Future of SaaS sector

As revolutionary as these products promise to be, ChatGPT definitely doesn’t offer full proof security even more so as APIs have become increasingly commonplace. “This is of prime importance to us. In banking, the conversations that customers have are the most confidential for both the bank as well as the customer. So obviously it can’t be connected to an API from OpenAI which is used by all and sundry because our database is a single place and that can’t be done. It has to be extremely secure like say private cloud implementations. We want both the innovation as well as the security and it is definitely doable,” Nadhamuni said. 

Nadhamuni predicts these generative AI tools to transform how the SaaS sector works. “It’s gonna be a lot more fluid thanks to these new technologies that are coming up. The opening plugins gave a snapshot of how we can build workflows across sectors. These are going to change the way we deliver SaaS products. Especially now with innovations like AutoGPT, it’s a totally different world. And SaaS companies will respond and just jump right into creating new workflows and experimenting right now. The more nimble ones will quickly start launching their products to leverage paradigms like AutoGPT and LangChain,” he said. 

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