GenAI to personalise financial services, help build billion-dollar companies in days, Amazon Pay’s Mahendra Nerurkar

Prosus Luminate event

GenAI will help fintech become more personalised while also bringing down the time to market as well as the cost to serve customers, said Amazon Pay's vice president for payments in emerging markets, Mahendra Nerurkar.

According to him, AI can increase the quality and reliability of the product. “Even a small natural language prompt will likely help the new AI-based solutions to underwrite customers better or detect fraud,” Nerurkar said in a panel discussion on May 22 at the Prosus’ Luminate event in Bengaluru.

Nerurkar said that skills or expertise in underwriting credit usually will take decades of intelligence building. “Now this is available to you right now for free as a consumer. If you have access to data, any single person can build a billion-dollar startup in no time," he added.

Nerurkar said that founders are going to be constrained by ambition, creativity and imagination. He added that founders and entrepreneurs were thinking about how they need to build databases, structure data, and write code that makes decisions.

“I think it is getting rapidly dismantled,” Nerurkar said.

Other panellists included Google Pay product management director Sharath Bulusu and Razorpay co-founder Shashank Kumar, with the discussion moderated by PayU India CEO Anirban Mukherjee.

Bulusu said that people will approach problems differently in the near future. He said that anyone can take a picture of something and say that this is broken and ask AI to fix it. “You don't need to learn how to navigate a software that fixes a piece of machine. AI brings a multimodal expression where you can speak, you can type, you can point or even take a live video to get solutions,” he added.

According to Bulusu, this also means that If someone wants to do things a particular way, they can spin up that software on demand.

Think about the possibility of what happens when every single person can spin up just that one piece of software that you need for just the amount of time you need. And if you don't like the way it does it, prompt it to make things different,” he added.

Bulusu said that this gives companies and individuals the ability to go to an nth degree of personalisation. “It is going to come from you telling the software what you want it to do. And the systems that we build will react to what you're asking for,” he added.

Kumar of Razorpay said that the degree of personalisation that social media offers today has to happen in financial services.

“This is a problem that we have with big banks, which build infrastructure for the whole of the country. And it is very difficult for them to build different things, different products,” Kumar said.

He pointed out that banks offer the same current account facility to a freelancer versus a mid-sized company versus a large corporation.

He said that the analytics and the views on top of it, or the suggestions of whether a customer is making the best use of the product, is not available to customers.

“Gen AI is at a level where it can take the data and it can give suggestions, the interface, the way you use the product. Whether it is the language support, the voice support or the personalisation… I think GenAI will help us connect financial services more deeply,” Kumar added.