Fintech startup Silot raises $8m to help banks make AI-assisted decisions

Two years ago, prominent Chinese seed investor ZhenFund made a splash in Southeast Asia by putting US$800,000 in Silot’s seed round. Now, the Singapore-based fintech startup has announced the raising of a series A round worth US$8 million.

Founded by a group of ex-Baidu executives, Silot’s patent-pending system assists banks in organizing their previously siloed data. The startup’s platform then feeds the bank’s data as well as its policies and rules into a decision engine – a “brain for banks” if you will – that makes decisions on behalf of bank staff.

That makes it different from other enterprise banking systems, such as those offered by Chinese insurance giant Ping An’s Singapore subsidiary OneConnect, which help banks automate processes but doesn’t assist as much in the actual decision-making logic.

What sort of decisions? In the case of Krungsri Bank – Thailand’s fifth-largest bank – Silot’s pilot test helped the organization detect transaction fraud and money laundering, block fraudulent transactions, as well as automate its merchant onboarding and verification processes. In addition, Silot also provided a QR code payments solution to Krungsri, which it, in turn, offers to merchants.

Andy Li, founder and CEO of Silot, tells Tech in Asia that decision-making in financial institutions remains a challenging problem for AI to solve. “The factors within financial services are much more complicated than chess” – referring to AlphaZero, which is currently the top AI player of Chess, Shogi, and Go.

Besides Krungsri, Silot says it has four other customers, which it charges annual and usage fees. Nobu Bank, which belongs to Indonesian conglomerate Lippo Group, has signed on. The rest cannot be disclosed due to confidentiality agreements.

“Some of them are global top-tier banks, some of them are regional top-tier banks,” says Li.

Leading Silot’s series A round is SBI Investment, the investment arm of Japanese financial services company SBI Holdings with a market cap of US$5 billion.

Joining the round is Krungsri’s corporate venture capital arm Finnovate, Japanese general trading conglomerate Sumitomo Corporation, and venture capital firm Arbor Ventures, which had also invested in other Southeast Asian startups like Akulaku, 2C2P, and Beam. Arbor had invested in Silot’s pre-series A round last year.

Update on March 26: The article previously said that Silot’s system was “patented”. We’ve fixed it to say “patent pending”.