EP1033: A Voice for Inclusive Banking

Pramit Bhargava, Founder of Louie Voice, Clayfin

Digital banking provider Clayfin has acquired voice technology platform Louie Voice to strengthen its AI-driven customer experience and accessibility capabilities. The acquisition adds advanced voice AI to Clayfin’s Cognitive Banking platform, enabling customers to interact with banking services and perform transactions using natural voice commands. Puja Sharma of IBS Intelligence speaks to Pramit Bhargava, Founder of Louie Voice at Clayfin, about the rise of voice-first banking, the role of AI in accessible financial services, and how banks can balance automation, security and human interaction.

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SPEAKER_00 0:02

I'm Pooja Sharma of IBS Intelligence, and you're listening to the IBS IViews podcast. With me is Prameet Bhargava, founder of Louis Voice at Clayfin. Digital banking solution provider, Clayfin had acquired voice technology platform Louis Voice as part of its strategy to enhance AI-driven customer experiences and expand accessibility across banking channels. The acquisition strengthens Clayfin's cognitive banking platform by adding advanced voice AI capabilities that enable users to perform banking transactions and interact with digital services using natural voice command. Welcome to the podcast, Prameet.

SPEAKER_01 0:40

Yeah, thanks, Pooja. Great to be here.

SPEAKER_00 0:42

Prameen Louis Voice was inspired by your personal experience with vision impairment. And how did the journey shape your mission to build a voice-first platform for financial services?

SPEAKER_01 0:52

Quick background. So I used to have a perfect vision. I'm a computer engineer from IT BHU, then went to Bangalore, then I was working with Hindus from Unilever. I've worked with various multinationals across sectors. So while in Unilever, and this almost 25 years back, there was a medicine that was given for joint pains, and the medicine did its task. So my joint pains disappeared. But then suddenly, one final day it was discovered that my vision has fallen quite a bit. Right. And doctors related it to the same drug. And uh, so the doctors, you know, I was given specs, it gave me partial correction, life continued. And about 12, 13 years back, there was another drop of vision, and this time completely out of the blue. And suddenly I saw text going up and down, and uh, and then after a while, I realized my specs were simply not working. I had to throw away the glasses, and uh, and then I realized everything got much more wavy, foggy, and then I realized I cannot read anything at all. Now imagine somebody who has done only corporate jobs in his life, and suddenly and I was at senior level and thought about you know, suddenly that thought of you know, how will I do Sheet, PowerPoint, this, that, emails to check, karma, and all of this filled me with so much uh fear, uh, you know, and uh I lost confidence. It took me almost four or five years. I was at home. Uh I didn't I wanted to do things, but you know, uh under series, there was no confidence left, you know, it was almost like that. And uh slowly I came out of it. There is a basic tool called a screen reader, so I just discovered it completely by accident, and that gave me enough uh you know confidence to come back. I was doing consulting, and how this thought for Louis voice came was that I used to go from one office to another using Uber. So Uber was at the center of this, at the center of this thought. So, you know, I with my screen reader I could book Uber, but every time what will happen, imagine for a normal person, the Uber is meant to be a very relaxed right, you are going from point A to point B. For me, sitting inside Uber, I suddenly think, oh boy, uh will this guy drop me at the right destination? Is my payment method PTM or cash? And suddenly, you know, that whole uh you know the worries will start uh popping up. And from that time on, I used to think that look, why can't I give voice commands and book my boy? You know, that was the simple problem that I wanted to solve, and this uh thing was coming that there should be a solution like that. So that's how this thought was actually planted in my mind.

SPEAKER_00 3:18

Uh makes sense. Why do you believe voice is the next major interface for banking and how is Louis voice driving that transaction?

SPEAKER_01 3:26

So, like I said, I still take the Uber example because sometimes it's much easier to understand. So imagine uh this whole uh just put try and put yourself in my streets, right? And if uh if, for example, I could have just given a command saying uh book uh Uber Go for home, and it could have opened up the screens or chose Uber Go for me, and then confirmed back that okay, this is the fair, you're going from point A to point B, yeah, etc. etc. This is your destination, this is how you're paying. I mean, imagine how simple uh life would uh become for anybody. It's not just social employee, uh right. So the same thought has actually gone into banking and finance. And it's uh, you know, so we though we are a sector agnostic solution, we decided to focus on the financial sector because this is where we felt that given the low literacy level, financial literacy level in the country, given the kind of challenges that are there, and if we have to move toward Vitchet Bharat, I think financial uh being uh, you know, everybody being a part of that financial mainstream is very important. So that's why we are focusing on banking, and the thought is very similar. Louis Voice is built with a similar thought that you know, whatever intent you have in your mind. So let's say I'm somebody a farmer, I'm illiterate, may or may not have to be disabled, uh, you know, but because it applies for so many people, I could be somebody elderly, I could be somebody a lot of these financial apps are only in English. So I could be somebody who knows Gujarati very well, Marathi very well, but I could converse in my language. So if you see, uh, you know, the where voice interfaces make it simple is that I just speak my country intake. And it's up to Zubi voice to actually get the work done, whether it's uh within banking, whether it's within mutual funds, you know, it just becomes as simple as that.

SPEAKER_00 5:07

How can financial institutions turn accessibility from compliance requirement into business growth opportunity?

SPEAKER_01 5:15

Actually, you know, the funny thing is there was no compliance requirement, right? So, but uh and if you uh really look at it, uh you'll be you're right, because the first instance people hear my story, they think, oh, it's for accessibility for you know visually impaired people and so on. But like I said, uh if you if you you know more and more, I'll give you another example. So we are also uh through RBI uh talking about or talking with the banks for CBDC apps, right? These are the digital rupee apps for, and where you know a use case is the direct benefit transfer, right? Now, if you if you look at a use case like that, uh like I said, the direct benefits are going to people who are typically less literate, less financially literate, language barriers for the elderly also. Uh on and on, anybody who finds uh using uh a financial app difficult, right? So it just makes it uh so simple. So I would say that there is a strong business case. In fact, I really speaking, all our businesses, all the customers that we have, there is a very strong business reason why they will like to do it. I'll take the other example of Nippon, for example, Nippon Mutual Fund. I think again uh there the fact that uh we can go, their actors only in English, but we can provide voice interfaces in multiple uh Indian languages, right? That could be another very strong reason because you could uh really increase your customer base, you know, and not necessarily limit it to a small 70% of users only to understand in India, understand and uh can read the uh English language, right?

SPEAKER_00 6:43

So you're really widening the how can banks strike the right balance between AI-driven automation, security, and human touch in conversational banking? Obviously, we have to touch on AI and how it is changing the landscape of uh conversational banking also today.

SPEAKER_01 7:00

So, I can tell you our experience because we are an eight-year-old startup, right? So we started in an era because we are single-mindedly focusing on voice interfaces for apps and websites. So we started in a where when of course there was no AI to an era where you know, of course, there was a transition that was happening last uh, I would say three years or so to our now, where we are almost like an AI first company. Right now, what I can tell you with great confidence, given our uh experiences, that AI for us has brought uh, you know, if if I were to ask it, just purely in terms of efficacy, in terms of even being able to do uh, you know, what we are supposed to do with voice interface much, much better at a completely different level. That's the kind of impact AI has had. Because if you really look at it, I I can break up this whole voice interface uh thing into two parts. One is a user gives a certain command and understanding the intent of the user, right? That's part one. Part two is getting that work done, getting that transaction done within the app and the website. So if you look at it, this entire area of intent determination, and uh like I said, uh see earlier, earlier. If you see the solutions used to be that you will force a user into saying specific keywords, so it was around keyword matching. Now, today, what AI enables is a user can pretty much say anything. So I'll give you an example. So even now, for example, in a banking app, if a user because you can't train a user, so you can't train a user to say uh account balance but they may not. User is very likely to say it uh you know, the user when you advance, it will immediately say account balance. It will take you to transaction industry. So that's the level of impact that AI has uh brought into our business.

SPEAKER_00 8:48

The level of accuracy that means the uh person need not be trained. It also uh comes from financial inclusion point of view when people from tier three to tier five people in villages who do not know to communicate, even form a sentence, can this can enhance the whole experience.

SPEAKER_01 9:04

And even otherwise, I think just look at it that I can say whatever I have in mind, and this uh Louis voice will stand it. I you know it could be so great for any of us. Like, for example, banks, their uh you know the technical word is fund transfer. Now, how many of even you and I use uh fund transfer? I may say, oh, just uh supply it to me, right? Or uh sell it to MPS, right? So that's the level of I would say freedom from the from for the user, and the fact that now voices, voice interfaces can grow because the U and user can rely on that.

SPEAKER_00 9:37

Which recent advances in voice AI Pramit will have the greatest impact on the next generation of conversational banking, according to you.

SPEAKER_01 9:45

So, like I said, I gave an example of how intent determination uh is making a dramatic uh difference and across languages. So I think it needs to become better at understanding uh different languages, and where there's a gap right now is understanding Indian dialects. So even how Hindi may be spoken in so many dialects. Yeah, that's one area. The second area where we would be we are trying to move towards, where where the LLM sort of becomes the brain and heart of this voice interface solution, where it is not only figuring out the intent, it's also dynamically determining based on its understanding of the underlying app and the website, where it is dynamically determining what next should be done, right, on the screen, etc. etc. So right now there's a separate uh SDK that we use for that. So I think it will all move in a direction where eventually it's the AI, I will call it more of an agentic behavior, where it has been trained in such a way that it can take independent uh decisions, it can, you know, in uh work in a very dynamic area, it's something you know, unpredictable areas. So that's the kind of movement that I see apart from, of course, like I said, languages and dialects.

SPEAKER_00 10:52

So there is advancement, and uh the agentic AI will definitely take a larger role in this. If you have to summarize this, what are the few few trends that you see in this space?

SPEAKER_01 11:04

See, it's all chicken and egg, right? Because see, the fact is that unless there is a solution, right, you will not have people use it. And like I said, a key requirement of an end user is I give my format, I I I expect the voice assistant to understand what I'm saying and get my work done, right? That's a simple now. So far, I mean it's very surprising, even to the best of our knowledge, as of today, we do not have a direct competitor, right? So, so for example, for example, now uh in fact, we are right now working with one of the top banks in the country, and uh uh when it goes live, it will be Words first uh at scale mass execution, uh, you know, with the voice interface, uh, actually driving banking transactions. So, what I would say in that sense, because nobody is doing it, we are still at an early stage. There's a lot of concept selling that we have to do. I am also, in a way, like a missionary going around preaching the benefits of uh uh voice interfaces and so on, right? But my sense is the moment this big one comes out in the market, and more, you know, one or two uh of these uh actual uh uh integrations have happened and uh apps are out there where people can try it out. The good thing with voice is it's very, very addictive. You uh a user uses it once, it's almost like tasting the blood. If it gets the work done, right, it is very, very addictive. Then why will I struggle on a screen? Why will I sort of figure out yeah feature kidare, what feature kidare, I will just give a voice command and quickly get my body. True, true, right? So that's the way I will look at it. It will probably happen, and uh it's already happening, right? But two years from now, Puja, we may be having a very different uh dramatically different conversation.

SPEAKER_00 12:47

Thank you so much, Pramit, for your time. Pramit Bhargava, founder of Louis Voice at Clay Fen.