With mutual fund penetration in India still in single digits, SBI Mutual Fund is betting on conversational AI to make investing accessible, intuitive, and jargon-free. In an exclusive conversation with Express Computer, R. S. Srinivas Jain, Chief of Strategy, Digital & Technology at SBI Mutual Fund, discusses how the recently launched SmartAssist, an AI-powered WhatsApp-based investing assistant, is bridging the trust and accessibility gap in mutual fund adoption. Jain outlines the five pillars of SBI MF’s digital transformation, the role of conversational AI in making investing intuitive, and their commitment to inclusivity, security, and sustainability and how it blends scale and simplicity to bring first-time investors and distributors into the fold.
SBI Mutual Fund recently launched ‘SmartAssist’, an AI-powered WhatsApp-based assistant. What role do you see conversational AI playing in transforming the future of mutual fund investing, especially in a country as diverse as India?
Conversational AI has the potential to fundamentally bridge the gap between trust and simplicity in mutual fund investing. Mutual funds are still a relatively new product for many Indians, and the education gap is best addressed through tools that understand context and communicate in familiar ways. With SmartAssist, we have built an AI-powered assistant on WhatsApp, a platform already used by over 500 million Indians. This is not just about deploying new technology; it’s about giving confidence to the first-time investor, particularly in semi-urban and rural India. We also plan to extend this to our partners, enabling them to assist their customers through guided chats and digital handholding. Going forward, conversational AI will play the dual role of educator and executor, helping reduce drop-offs, eliminate jargon, and make investing feel as intuitive as chatting with a friend.
With over 29 years in the financial services industry and 22 years in investment management, how has your leadership approach evolved in response to the rapid digital disruption we’ve seen in the last decade?
Leadership today has become less about control and more about ecosystem thinking. We have shifted from focusing on projects to building platforms, from owning everything to enabling partnerships, and from chasing perfection to moving with speed and purpose. In financial services, where trust is paramount, the real challenge has been balancing innovation with reliability. My role has increasingly become about shaping culture, ensuring tech and business speak the same language, compliance, and product work together, and experimentation happens within a secure, accountable framework.
Equally important is the ability to visualise how the future might evolve and to take structured, informed bets. That requires a deep understanding of our market, our users, and global trends. But above all, it comes down to investing in a strong, motivated team, one that’s empowered, aligned, and willing to build for the long term.
As someone spearheading strategy, digital, and technology at SBI MF, what are the core pillars of your digital transformation roadmap, and how are you leveraging emerging technologies like AI and analytics to enhance investor experience?
While our digital strategy has evolved over time, today it is anchored around five core pillars. First, frictionless access ensures investors, distributors, and bank partners can engage with us seamlessly across channels, leveraging India’s Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI) and open frameworks to drive reach and scale. Second, knowing our users and delivering contextual personalisation allows us to employ AI and data-led insights to offer relevant nudges, tailored journeys, and simplified communication based on behaviour. Third, our digital-first distribution approach encompasses Mitra-assisted journeys for banks, our partner portal and app, SDKs for fintechs, and deep integration with core banking systems. Fourth, we have built a robust backend infrastructure on next-generation, both on-premises and cloud-native, API-first architecture that is scalable, agile, and secure. Finally, our partner-ready platforms, such as Invest Stack, feature a published API library enabling partners to create their own secure and efficient solutions for onboarding, portfolio views, and instant redemptions. We view digital not merely as a front-end interface but as an intelligence layer across the organisation.
AI and analytics help us anticipate needs, reduce friction, and respond faster, whether supporting customers, enabling partners, or assisting employees. Internally, digital is driving productivity through automation, smarter workflows, and real-time dashboards that aid decision-making, cut turnaround times, and allow teams to focus on high-impact tasks.
Throughout, cybersecurity and information security remain non-negotiable, with enterprise-grade controls built into every system and integration to ensure trust, compliance, and resilience.
For us, digital is not simply about convenience; it is about scale, speed, intelligence, and inclusion benefiting every stakeholder in our ecosystem, from customers and partners to employees and the enterprise itself.
SBI MF SmartAssist offers an intuitive investing journey through WhatsApp. Can you share the key tech stack or partnerships that helped bring this product to life, and how you ensured it remained both secure and scalable?
SmartAssist has been developed with a modular architecture that combines the strengths of conversational AI, integration flexibility, and enterprise-grade security. Its conversational layer is powered by large language models trained on mutual fund-specific prompts, enriched with insights from our contact centre interactions and traditional chatbot workflows, ensuring that user queries are understood in context and addressed in a natural, helpful manner. Far from being a standalone tool, SmartAssist is embedded within a wider digital ecosystem that includes SDKs co-designed and refined with fintech partners to enhance the assisted journey, internal APIs that connect to our core transaction systems and knowledge services for real-time, accurate responses, and smart routing with orchestration to ensure investor requests are managed securely and efficiently. From inception, the platform was engineered for scalability, auditability, and robust data protection, ensuring reliability and responsiveness for both first-time investors and experienced distributors, regardless of demand. Crucially, SmartAssist is a continuously evolving solution, with user feedback and usage data driving the addition of new use cases, ongoing experience improvements, and an expansion of its role from simple query handling to a comprehensive investing and servicing assistant.
Inclusivity is a major goal for SBI MF, and with SmartAssist, you’re reaching users even in remote corners of the country. How are you planning to localise the experience, and what role do regional languages and vernacular interfaces play in your roadmap?
Inclusivity for us means reach, relevance and impact. While SmartAssist has been launched in English to start with, it has been designed to support multiple Indian languages in the coming phases. But this is not just about translation; we are focused on local context and natural user behaviour. For example, how someone in rural Maharashtra talks about investment might be quite different from how someone in Tamil Nadu expresses the same need.
Beyond SmartAssist, we’re bringing this thinking into our entire digital ecosystem, including our InvestApp, partner app, Mitra interface, and other SDK-based journeys. These platforms are being adapted for regional languages, voice interactions, and local usage patterns.
Our goal is simple, that is users should not have to relearn how to invest; they should be able to interact with us in the way they’re most comfortable. That’s where true digital inclusion begins, and we’re committed to building for that.
You also lead international and sustainability initiatives. How do digital and AI-driven platforms align with SBI MF’s broader ESG goals and its mission to be an ethical and innovative investment partner?
At SBI MF, we see digital and ESG as strongly aligned pillars of long-term value creation. Every digital initiative we undertake, whether it’s paperless onboarding, remote servicing, or self-help tools, helps reduce environmental footprint and supports sustainable scalability.
AI-driven platforms add another layer of impact. They help us detect ESG risks within portfolios, assess sustainability metrics more accurately, and curate responsible investment models tailored for institutions and partners. We also use internally developed enterprise tools to promote transparency, governance, and compliance, critical components of the “G” in ESG.
We believe responsible innovation is the only sustainable way forward. And technology, when thoughtfully applied, can be a powerful lever, helping us deliver at scale, stay ethical in execution, and stay future-ready.