‘Technology Will Be The Key Differentiator Shaping The BFSI Industry’: Ganesh Gopalan, CEO, Gnani.ai

This product can automate customer support calls and outbound call campaigns and push the payment to online modes, away from manual payment collection. Recently, there has been an increased usage of bots, especially in the BFSI to help out consumers, and also to pave the way for a future that’s endorsed by technology.

Ganesh Gopalan, CEO, Gnani.ai, narrates his entrepreneurial journey and how technology is helping him achieve new milestones everyday.

How do you think is the BFSI sector faring amid the pandemic?

We see a lot of push on IT spends, Digitisation, and Innovation in the BFSI sector. Despite the current situation, we believe there will be a lot more focus on bringing in tech interventions to help brands engage with their customers and to keep the communication going.

From a technology perspective, we are definitely seeing many BFSI companies starting to embrace the power of artificial intelligence. According to a recent report by McKinsey  30 percent of tasks in BFSI industry will be taken over by machines by 2022 and the implementation of technologies like ML, IoT and AI will be the key drivers.

With technology becoming a crucial part we believe digital is the future. We have been working with our partner banks to ensure that the business momentum is continued and also working with them to help them get ready to offer next-generation banking and customer experience. Lately we have seen a surge in the AI-based solution for functions such as customer acquisition, onboarding, collection, cross-sell, up-sell and customer experience.

How is gnani.ai specialising in providing AI speech recognition engines and NLP platforms? 

gnani.ai offers deep tech highly accurate proprietory AI speech recognition engines and NLP platforms. Our unique APIs can be leveraged for speech-text analysis, automated voicebots, advanced speech analytics and AI backed predictive models in regional languages. Gnani.ai supports twelve Indian languages, namely Hindi, Kannada, Telugu, Tamil, Malayalam, Gujarati, Marathi, Punjabi, and Bengali,  including English “in our Indian accent”.

At gnani.ai. we are focused on building AI-powered local language support for products that serve banks and financial institutions For example, in India, we typically speak in multiple languages even in a given sentence. We have developed a bilingual speech engine that is able to understand speech in multiple languages. Also, the team has been working on creating specific AI models in speech and NLP for particular industry niches industries. For example, we have pre-trained speech models and NLP libraries for specific use cases for BFSI.  The team has built solutions for iOS and Android phones, for use via app and website, as well as support for telephony. For example, a user can call a number and experience the whole flow of conversational AI. As a result, our voicebots can even be used by end customers who prefer to speak in their local language and only have feature phones

What forms of technology is gnani.ai adopting? Could you give us details?

We offer the most accurate AI-based speech recognition and Natural language processing technologies. We have recently launched a product called as the “Gnani Collection Voicebot” for BFSI companies that is integrated with existing systems and communications channels. The product offers a voicebot over telephony lines in multiple Indian languages. The Gnani Collection voicebot informs customers about their overdue EMI payments or their insurance premium renewals and has an intelligent conversation with them in their language of choice. The “persona” of the voicebot can also be tuned based on the customer that is being spoken to. Our voicebots have had millions of conversations with customers in multiple languages and we believe that these voicebots will significantly enhance people’s interaction with the technology.

How do you think would technology be a key differentiator in shaping the BFSI industry at large?

We believe technology will be the key differentiator that will shape the BFSI industry at large. The banks as we know them now will change and will have to go through major transformations to offer hassle-free efficient transactions.  BFSI companies are making strategic technology decision to stay ahead of the curve and to provide a smooth and differentiated customer experience to all their customers.

Could you enlighten us on your funding status?

gnani.ai is one of the first few companies funded by Samsung Ventures in April 2019.

What next do you have in queue?

We are focused on delivering value to our customers across the country through our proprietary AI technologies. The long term milestones are in alignment with our corporate mission which is to help the real India get the benefits of digitization through AI based speech and Natural Language Technologies.