Sanjay Uppal is the Founder and CEO of finbots.ai, an Accel-backed fintech that has developed an AI-powered credit risk scorecard solution that delivers high accuracy and automates the tedious and expensive process lenders face when developing and deploying scorecards.

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👋🏼 How would you explain your job to someone outside tech?

I’ve been in the AI space for over 5 years, way before it became cool.

In the past few years, I’ve spent building creditX, the world’s first AI-powered, no-code, Credit Scorecard System, that is today transforming the lending business, enabling lenders to predict credit risk with higher accuracy – at a fraction of time and cost of current practices.

This also enables our clients to offer fair lending and drive financial inclusion, giving underserved markets access to credit.

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🧐 What's something about you or your job that would surprise us?

Today, our product, creditX, is used across 4 regions: Asia, Australia, the Middle East and Africa, and across lending verticals including banks, neobanks, FinTechs, supply chain finance, micro-finance and credit bureaus.

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🏆 What has been the biggest highlight of your career so far?

Leaving the cushy corner office in banking after a 20-year career and starting my own business must rank up there. Through my career, I realized that many legacy challenges in financial services have remained unaddressed for decades.

These presented business opportunities for me to solve and drive transformational change.

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🔍 What's a startup trend or space you're watching this year?‍

Emergence of use cases in Generative AI have ignited the conversation on the possibilities of AI. I believe these conversations will help in acceptance of AI and bring focus to responsible uses of AI.

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I expect these developments to result in the emergence of more solutions in both Generative and Predictive AI domains. Predictive AI solutions such as that developed by finbots.ai are still rare and we expect more use cases to emerge to solve legacy problems.

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💼 What advice would you give someone starting out in your industry?

The best investment I made was moving out of my comfort zone, taking up numerous jobs in different countries (7 in total!). The process of shifting, learning about a new culture, meeting different types of people, and understanding new viewpoints changed me for the better.

Moving out of your comfort zone doesn’t necessarily have to be literally moving to a new country. It could be trying new things, learning new ways of doing things, or just immersing yourself in new experiences.

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🗣 What's one thing you can keep talking about for hours?

Artificial Intelligence, especially the necessity to ensure adoption of fair & transparent AI, and establishing of accountability as we see AI enter more aspects of our lives.

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🎥 What's your favorite movie/TV show?

In Pursuit of Happyness

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🍨 What's your go-to ice cream flavor?‍

Anything chocolate or with chocolate