L&T Finance RAISE’ 25 Sets a New Blueprint for AI in BFSI

As per the World Economic Forum, the financial sector spent $45 Billion on AI in 2024, highlighting the increasing role of AI in personalisation, fraud detection, process automation, governance, and ethical frameworks, amongst others.

India’s financial services sector is shifting from simple digital access to deep ‘intelligent inclusion,’ a dialogue that dominated at L&T Finance RAISE’ 25 event that was held on November 7, 2025, in Mumbai under the theme "Accelerating Financial Services with AI." The second edition of the event witnessed a massive turnout of about 6,000 physical and virtual attendees — gathering to chart the future of AI-driven financial services. The event included inspiring keynote speeches, engaging panel discussions, informative presentations, AI zones, and L&T Finance’s initiatives on AI.

One of the leading NBFCs in the country, L&T Finance has a strong nationwide presence supported by over 13,000 partner touchpoints, a rapidly scaling digital platform, and deep penetration across urban, semi-urban, and rural markets. Its business is now almost entirely retail, with a portfolio mix spanning across housing loan, two-wheeler loan, personal loan, farm equipment loan, rural business loan, business loan, loan against property, and gold loan. The company has a customer base of over 2.7 Crore, backed by a robust workforce of over 37,000 employees. It’s AI initiative - RAISE’ 25 offered a unique opportunity to explore the latest advancements in Generative and Predictive AI, its practical applications, and invaluable insights from industry pioneers in the BFSI sector.

Leveraging AI in Financial Services in India

Opening the conclave, S. N. Subrahmanyan, Chairman & Managing Director of Larsen & Toubro and Non-Executive Director & Chairperson of L&T Finance, set the tone of the event by speaking on “Leveraging AI in Financial Services in India.” He described L&T Finance’s focus on AI as a new infrastructure for competitive advantage in the financial services sector. He highlighted that the future belongs to those who deploy AI brilliantly, using L&T Finance's multi-lingual voice AI as an example of technology enabling inclusion powered by intelligence. Specifically, how the AI assists farmers in regional language like Marathi with loan options or can help a customer in Tamil language with repayment navigation, showcasing how AI facilitates seamless financial inclusion.

Global Insights & Public Infrastructure

The event featured heavyweights from the global tech ecosystem, including Peter Norvig, Director of Engineering at Google and Education Fellow at Stanford Institute for Human Centered Artificial Intelligence. Speaking on the topic, “AI Applications for Business - Now and in the Future,” he highlighted the pragmatic utility of AI in credit scoring, particularly for developing markets. He noted that AI’s ability to analyse unstructured data is a game-changer for underwriting customers who lack traditional banking footprints.

The event continued with a presentation by IAS Bhuvnesh Kumar, CEO of Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI). Speaking about “Building the World's Largest Biometric Identity System using AI: Lessons from UIDAI,” he emphasized the powerful digital transformation brought about by Aadhaar, which provided an identity to 25 crore people in the country who previously had none, ensuring their inclusion into the mainstream and making them eligible for social welfare schemes.

Unlocking Future Trends: Key Presentations

A recurring call to action was for the Indian tech ecosystem to pivot from consumption to creation. Dr. Manish Gupta, Senior Director, Research, Google DeepMind, urged the audience to solve distinct national challenges to become ‘producers of technology’ rather than just consumers of chips and chatbots in this presentation titled, “The Transformative Power of AI & Open Challenges.”

IAS Tanusree Deb Barma, Deputy Director General, UIDAI Technology Center, spoke on, “Managing Fraud in KYC.” She emphasized that once an Aadhaar is generated, the authentication process remains highly secure, supported by a tightly controlled and rigorously monitored network.

Echoing the sentiments of accelerating financial services with AI, Naveen Tewari, Founder & CEO of InMobi & Glance, described the current AI revolution as a ‘tectonic shift’ that levels the playing field, offering Indian enterprises a unique window to build global products at a rapid pace in his address titled, “The AI Revolution Enhancing Customer Delight.”

Dr. Debarag Banerjee, Chief AI & Data Officer at L&T Finance, outlined the company’s ‘use-case driven’ strategy while speaking about ‘L&T Finance’s AI journey in credit decisioning.’ He noted a shift toward agentic AI, where multi-agent systems coordinate to solve complex problems, moving beyond simple chatbots to sophisticated decisioning engines.

The session followed with the thought-provoking discussions on how AI is rapidly changing how we acquire customers, personalize outreach, and fine-tune acquisition strategies across segments. The first panel discussion of the day, titled “Applicability of AI in Customer Acquisition,” was moderated by Manish Kumar Gupta, Chief Executive of Urban Unsecured Assets, Payments & Digital Partnerships, L&T Finance. Bhavesh Jain, MD & CEO, TransUnion CIBIL; Anirban Mukherjee, CEO, PayU; and Madhusudan Ekambaram, Co-Founder & CEO, KreditBee, contributed to the discussion on how AI is driving smarter, sharper growth in India’s financial landscape.

The panel on “AI in Payments” featured industry stalwarts like Sohini Rajola, Executive Director-Growth, NPCI; Sandeep Malhotra, Executive Vice President, Core Payments - Asia Pacific, Mastercard; and Mihir Gandhi, Partner - Financial Services Consulting and Fintech, PwC, to discuss the role of AI in transforming payments. The session was moderated by Kshama Jain, Director, Kedaara Capital.

The panel on “AI Regulations for Financial Services” was moderated by Ruchin Goyal, MD & Senior Partner, BCG, and witnessed speakers like Sahil Kini, CEO, Reserve Bank Innovation Hub; Rohan Sachdev, Managing Partner, EY India Consulting; and Sharad Sharma, Co-founder, iSPIRT Foundation.

The next two sessions revolved around themes such as “AI in Customer Service, Portfolio Management & Collections.” The discussion was led by Ganesh Gopalan, CEO & Co-Founder, Gnani.ai and Sudipto Nag, President & Head - Retail Portfolio Management Group, Axis Bank. It was moderated by Zeenat Hamirani, Chief Risk Officer at L&T Finance.

The high-powered session titled, “How AI Will Reshape Financial Services in the Next 5 Years,” moderated by Avanne Dubash, covered how AI will not only reshape technology, but also redefine leadership and business models, amongst others. The panel members were Sudipta Roy, MD & CEO, L&T Finance; Daniel Lim, Senior Director, Salesforce Futures; Rajan Anandan, Managing Director, Peak XV & Surge; and Jeff Walters, Managing Director & Senior Partner, BCG.

L&T Finance Unveils ‘Nostradamus’

Demonstrating its commitment to an AI-first future, L&T Finance unveiled ‘Nostradamus,’ a new AI-powered innovation designed to transform how the institution monitors, detects, and acts on data. The launch was led by Sudipta Roy, MD & CEO; Dr. Debarag Banerjee, Chief AI & Data Officer; and Ramesh Aithal, Chief Digital Officer at L&T Finance. They also introduced Orion – The Nostradamus AI Co-pilot for Automated Portfolio Management and Project Helios – An Underwriting AI CoPilot, that simplifies, analyzes, and narrates complex underwriting data.

Real-life AI use cases and Innovation: Tech Track Presentations, Masterclasses, Pitch Point, and L&T Finance’s AI Challenges

Parallel to the main session, the event also spotlighted Tech Track presentations on the following topics: “Data Products Fueled by Generative AI,” by Dr. Stephen Brobst, CTO, Ab Initio Software, “From the App Economy to the Agentic Economy: How AI Will Redefine Financial Services,” by Siavash M Alamouti, Marconi Fellow, Co-Founder & Chairman, Mimik; “Enterprise AI Agents: Lessons from the real world,” by Sanjay Krishnan, Vice President, Concentric AI; and “Teaming up with AI to Write Code and Create Spreadsheets,” by Dr. Sriram Rajamani, Corporate Vice President, Core AI, Microsoft; followed by a Masterclass Session on the topic “Navigating The Next Frontier: Agentic AI in Financial Services,” by Swaminathan Aiyer, Senior Director, Cloud and AI Microsoft, India and South Asia; and Murari Ramuka, Senior Technology Strategist, Microsoft. The tech track sessions continued with deep-dives into other aspects like “Fueling AI Innovation with Cyber-Resilient Data Strategies,” by Vasu Murthy, Chief Product Officer, Cohesity; “ORACLE AI for Data - Where Data meets Intelligence,” by Tirthankar Lahiri, Senior Vice President, Mission - Critical Data & AI Engines, Oracle America. Dr. Indradeep Ghosh, CEO, Fujitsu Research of America spoke on, “FinTech offerings & research at Fujitsu - Current Landscape & Research,” and Dr. Partha Kanjilal, Co-founder & Chief Scientist, Research Care, discussed the session on “AI and Analytics in Market Regulation: Applications, Challenges & Insights.”

L&T Finance also launched ‘Pitch Point,’ an ultimate AI challenge, enabling early-to growth-stage AI startups to showcase solutions across BFSI and non-BFSI domains. Top five startups were shortlisted and were given an opportunity to present their solutions to the esteemed jury members. The jury members comprised of Rajan Anandan,

Managing Director, Peak XV Partners & Surge; Sushma Kaushik, Head of L&T Innovation Fund; Dr. Debarag Banerjee, Chief AI & Data Officer at L&T Finance; Piyush Shah, Co-founder of InMobi & President of Glance; IAS Tanusree Deb Barma, Deputy Director General, UIDAI Technology Centre; and Ashish Fafadia, Partner at Blume Ventures.

The event also spotlighted India’s emerging AI talent by facilitating winners of the Pearl Challenge and L&T Finance’s internal initiative, Empower AI which is designed to democratize AI within the company, encouraging all employees to find and implement AI use cases in their daily work. The initiative includes internal competitions, such as, "AI Showcase" and "AI-dea Xpress," to highlight innovative ideas and applications developed by employees.

Closing the event, Sudipta Roy, Managing Director & CEO of L&T Finance, celebrated the record attendance and reaffirmed the company’s vision to build a responsible, intelligent, and digitally connected financial ecosystem.

As the curtains closed on RAISE 2025, the message was clear: the BFSI sector is no longer just experimenting with AI—it is restructuring its entire DNA around it, and L&T Finance is at the forefront of this revolution.

RAISE’ 25 was organized with the support of L&T Finance’s partners like Google Cloud, Microsoft, Salesforce, and NVIDIA. Besides, Lanyard partner – Dynatrace and gifting partner – Finbox.

For those who couldn’t attend, the full event recording is available here.

(No ET Now Journalists are involved in creation of this article.)