• In-house AI rationale: HDFC Bank prioritizes building and owning AI internally rather than renting it, driven by sovereignty concerns and the need for 100% operational accuracy in critical banking processes like check extraction.
• Neiv platform governance: To stay ahead of evolving regulatory standards and maintain tight internal risk controls, the bank built its proprietary platform Neiv using a specialized team of 40 deep-tech professionals.
• Small model economics: Rejecting the need for multi-billion-dollar investments in large language models, HDFC Bank initiated Neiv with roughly 2 crore rupees in seed funding by focusing on smaller, sharper, domain-specific models.