When I first started working with fintech clients, one thing struck me immediately: every chatbot project felt like déjà vu. Teams were excited about automation, but weeks later the excitement had turned into frustration. Deployments dragged on, integrations kept breaking, and engineers were always the bottleneck.
Clients would ask: “Why does setting up a simple KYC chatbot take us a month?” And honestly, there wasn’t a good answer.
That’s when I realized: the problem wasn’t the idea of automation — it was the way we were building it.
I dug deeper, speaking with operations heads, compliance officers, and support managers across multiple BFSI institutions. The patterns were clear:
Limited tech bandwidth — Most teams didn’t have enough developers to handle chatbot customizations.
Complex integrations — Legacy systems made even small workflow changes painful.
Compliance headaches — Regulatory changes meant teams had to constantly rebuild flows.
The “aha” moment came when one compliance officer told me:
“We don’t need another AI platform. We need something that can keep up with how fast our rules change.”
That became the seed of SmartFlows.
With the problem defined, I started sizing the opportunity. The global conversational AI market was worth $20–25B, with BFSI alone contributing ~$1.5B. Even a sliver of that could mean millions in revenue.
But numbers alone don’t build conviction. I benchmarked competitors like Yellow.ai and Gupshup. They were powerful, but their onboarding was developer-first, not business-first. That left a gap: a low-code, compliance-ready platform that BFSI teams could actually use on their own.