In Conversation with Uday Akkaraju, CEO of BOND.AI
Uday Akkaraju is the CEO of BOND.AI, an award-winning human-centered artificial intelligence platform for banks.
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Updated November 2026. This was first published on 22 November 2022. The idea is the same. Any number below is what the original piece said then. It is not a new count. This is a record of a conversation from that day. No new quotes were added.
Key takeaways
- Uday Akkaraju is the CEO of BOND.AI, an award-winning human-centered artificial intelligence platform for banks.
- Uday Akkaraju has a background in interaction design and cognitive science and focuses on making machine intelligence empathetic and created the world’s first Empathy EngineTM for finance.
- Uday was recognized as an ‘International Innovator’ by the New York City Economic Development Corporation and as ‘Titians of tech’ by Arkansas Money & Politics.
About Uday Akkaraju #
Uday Akkaraju is the CEO of BOND.AI, an award-winning human-centered artificial intelligence platform for banks. Uday Akkaraju has a background in interaction design and cognitive science and focuses on making machine intelligence empathetic and created the world’s first Empathy EngineTM for finance. Uday was recognized as an ‘International Innovator’ by the New York City Economic Development Corporation and as ‘Titians of tech’ by Arkansas Money & Politics.
Prior to BOND.AI, Uday founded and successfully ran an artificial intelligence research lab that helped early stage companies design the product and take it to market. He regularly speaks at international tech conferences such as the Mobile World Congress, Paris Fintech Forum, Money 2020, IBM Tech Talks, Signal, Finovate, Voice and more. Outside of the office, Uday advises a number of AI startups & entrepreneurs to help create fair and equitable machine learning systems.
Tell us a bit of your past before you started bond.ai, and what inspired you to start this #
I was a complete outsider to the financial services domain & bringing this concept to market was not even an idea. But before starting BOND.AI, I spent many years travelling, understanding various cultures, and looking at people’s needs and suffering to try to contribute to solving their problems. Seeing and living someone else’s issues gives you a completely different perspective on life. It gives you a sense of responsibility and genuinely makes you map out how you fit in this world.
But a few years ago, I was in a serious problem myself. I had a financial situation and probably hit the worst phase of my life. I badly needed help, but none of my banks or anybody would empathize with me. There was no way out other than trying to create a program to help understand myself as a third person: to empathize with my future self. I did that, and in 18 months, I was lucky to be entirely out of that hole. I even had enough left to invest in BOND.AI.
When I saw from higher up, it was not just me. I found more than 2/3rd of the people who took the survey were struggling. About 70% of the United States population & almost half of the world’s population were under financial stress. The realization was profound, and that life-changing journey was the reason behind even thinking of making this a business idea.
What’s your vision with bond.ai? Could you tell us your expansion plans in terms of which #
If one has to stay happy, we believe there are three pillars we need to take care of: Physical health, mental health & financial health. All three are somewhat interdependent, and our focus at BOND.AI is enhancing the financial health aspect of every consumer who uses our platform.
We provide our AI platform to financial institutions so that they can better serve their consumers, unlike what happened in my case when I had an issue. Financial institutions are in the best position to help move our societies & communities in a better direction because they sit at the center of the economy, and they need to act.
We recently launched a new product called the ‘BOND Account’. It is a complete re-invention of a bank account. It is the world’s first financial wellness account for banks & credit unions. With a game-changing user interface, a revolutionary ‘Insight-a-Day’ module powered by our Empathy Engine®, and a chatbot as your friendly financial advisor, the BOND Account is an amalgamation of all our work so far. While we majorly serve the US-based institutions now, the BOND Account will be available in international markets, starting with India & APAC this September.
Could you describe your Empathy Engine in detail for our readers and what it does? #
Empathy is our greatest ability and what defines us as humans. Empathy is something where you put yourself in someone else’s position, feel like them & think like them. But you cannot truly empathize unless you know enough about the consumer or you have been in a similar situation before. Right now, we as a civilization are on a cusp where our ability to empathize is fading.
The reason, our lives are surrounded by so much information & misinformation overload that deciphering between signal & noise is becoming impossible. With so much noise & empathy deficit, it is difficult for one to think clearly and empathize with our future self! That insight drove us to help reflect back to users their own behavior.
The empathy engine is based on the consumer’s financial data. it creates unique personas and understands their behavior & what they truly need. It then helps enhance their financial health by giving one insight every day.
By introducing insights/suggestions as behavioral nudges, the engine incrementally helps influence users’ behavior towards their stated financial goals. With the empathy engine, we create an augmented version of ourselves to communicate to them and their subconscious. The empathy engine-powered bot or the GUI is an enhanced version of you—it knows your needs and influences you. But at the end of every conversation, the needle moves in the right direction.
You mention that there is a 65% decrease in call centre costs and a 40% increase in digita #
Let us take an example here: You want to find out details about your FD balance or interest earned or your home loan pay-off amount. These are straightforward tasks for which you need not call your bank’s customer care or log in to your online banking. Just interacting with our voice bot on your phone will get answers 24x7. Having a bot is a no-brainer, but most financial institutions are just adopting it. The Empathy Engine powers our chatbot to have more advanced conversations to add to the standard FAQs it can answer. For example, a consumer can ask for advice for securing retirement funds, what can they afford, or even questions like “Am I making the right decision in buying a house now?” With such a variety of use-cases, we see a decrease in a call to customer care. hence, banks are saving significant money. No, the same 20 people working in the call centre can be focussed on answering more complex questions, and for customers, the wait times are less. It is optimizing time & money for everyone.
Why do you feel it’s the right time to deploy chatbots in the banking sector? #
As I mentioned above, there are so many redundant tasks you can automate with bots. Secondly, financial decisions are not something you take instantly. You need advice, guidance to finally pull the trigger. And for getting advice, you need to have multiple conversations with someone. If a bot can do that and drive empathy, why not, right? Also, conversations are a natural phenomenon for humans. There is no need to articulate anything but simply speak. Banking is complicated, and chatbots can simplify it.
What can fintech do to shape humanity’s future? #
Money is not the only aspect our lives are based upon but certainly is a significant part of how our lives are shaped. With what we have been through in the last year, today’s fintech has a unique opportunity to use this new beginning to reshape our lives. If earth returns to the previous normal, we as a fintech community will have failed. Fintech so far has excelled and succeeded in creating frictionless tools. But what it has not done (and can do) is create economic equality. Today we are divided based on economic status. Right from countries to neighborhoods, it has become a way of segmentation and how one receives benefits. The gap between the wealthy and the poor is at a historic high compared to the pre-pandemic times. Even the advent of cryptocurrencies which is a fantastic way to create money, has failed to address this fundamental factor.
The next generation of fintech can reshape our lives if it can focus on three important factors: Re-calibrating consumer behavior, Tools for better wealth distribution, and Help financial institutions move at the speed of fintech.
Re-calibrate consumer behavior: Everyone has some kind of need or has taken a hit on their economic stability and is looking for insights on how to get out of it. In the US, a cornerstone advisor’s research said 63% of consumers say that their financial institution is not helping or may hurt their financial health. In whatever vertical a fintech is operating, be it loans, credit, etc. Along with providing frictionless tools, they have to focus on imparting bite-sized knowledge contextually while engaging with the consumer. They provide insights just to bring them back to normal and proactively recalibrate their behavior to help them become financially resilient to future crises.
Tools for better wealth distribution: With any pandemic or recession, the hourly wage workers, the middle and upper-middle-income (the majority), are probably the worst affected. Fintechs have excelled in alternate credit modeling & even high-risk lending. now we need to ask how we can address the fundamental problem of income inequality. Is universal basic income(UBI) the right solution? Can we create a universal retirement plan/401k like medical insurance? The great recession of the past actually reduced income inequality, but this time fintech needs to take it to the next level.
Help banks move at the speed of fintech: Fintech cannot do it alone. Banks have unmatched advantages of data and large consumer pools, and fintech only needs to help banks move faster. They say the faster you move, the slower the time gets, and at the speed of light, time stops. Similarly, suppose fintech can help connect the dots between legacy systems, modern connectivity protocols & frictionless applications. In that case, banks can run at the speed of fintech, and the time to address consumer needs will relatively become zero.
Can we enhance income or wages by mapping the interconnectedness between consumer behavior #
While we mine the data of consumers, we spot so many inefficiencies in profiles*. People live complicated & integrated lives, yet we engage with them in highly silo’d ways. Simply ask yourself a question: Do you know how buying a house today may affect your kid’s education? Or do you know by how many years you can prepone your retirement if you focus 50% more on your hobbies like selling art? We need to build an interconnected system that maps one’s strengths, potential, weaknesses & interests. Just by connecting an individual’s parameters, our models predict a 20% increase in income. Imagine we connect that individual persona beyond fintech with sectors like employers, health care providers, universities. It will not only enhance income for all but also create a more equitable system.
Voice may be the future, but how can we make it secure now? Is voice biometrics there yet? #
Yes, speaking is natural for humans, and hence a voice UI is definitely how we should and will interact with machines. Deepfakes has made it easy to create fake audio or video that privacy is the most important area to focus on today. But the technology is there - Similar to how we authenticate a user’s identity using OTP and credentials on a mobile device, it is a safe way to use a combination of cloud & on-device processing to verify and authenticate a user’s voice biometrics. At BOND.AI, we are also working on tokenizing a voice fingerprint to distinguish what is original, similar to how NFTs work.
It’s amazing how you create a persona of consumers and small businesses to understand thei #
A persona is not complete until you understand the consumer or the small business holistically. The biggest mistake one can make is to start giving advice based on an incomplete persona. Imagine a doctor treating with incomplete knowledge of their patients. Once we integrate with a financial institution, pass the data through our empathy engine, which creates a bare persona based on the consumer’s financial data. But financial data is only a part of the whole life of the consumer, right? This is where our empathy engine really works. Apart from analyzing existing data, it also spots the missing data needed to understand them holistically. So while the consumer is having a conversation with our bot for some need, we get the missing data contextually. Let me give a classic example: Imagine a consumer is asking the bot for a credit card recommendation - The bot looks at his/her data and suggests the right card. But while looking at the data, the bot spots he/she travels quite a bit. And then contextually, the bot creates a new question and asks, “Hey, I see you travel quite a bit. The user may say, Indigo, Lufthansa, etc. This is a basic example, but such intangible data points really add up. We then combine the financial & non-financial data to create highly accurate & holistic personas and to give singular insights!
What are the challenges you have faced and are facing in an unpredictable market like in t #
There is uncertainty regarding liquidity, hiring, expansion plans and even onboarding new clients. Everything is up in the air and it has been tough. What is holding the glue for us, is removing uncertainty of what we already have. Making sure our employees are happy, content & taking good care of our banking clients during this time.
What message do you have for entrepreneurs that are starting out? What should be the best #
Have I seen something I couldn’t see before? Have I thought something I haven’t thought about before? Did I do something that I haven’t done before?
You won’t have an answer to that every time you question yourself. But over time, it will change your perspective in how you see the world, people around you and will develop kindness & empathy. After all as an entrepreneur, you are looking to change people’s lives by solving their unsolved problems, isn’t it?
Questions and answers #
Could you describe your Empathy Engine in detail for our readers and what it does? #
Empathy is our greatest ability and what defines us as humans. Empathy is something where you put yourself in someone else’s position, feel like them & think like them.
Why do you feel it’s the right time to deploy chatbots in the banking sector? #
As I mentioned above, there are so many redundant tasks you can automate with bots. Secondly, financial decisions are not something you take instantly.
What can fintech do to shape humanity’s future? #
Money is not the only aspect our lives are based upon but certainly is a significant part of how our lives are shaped. With what we have been through in the last year, today’s fintech has a unique opportunity to use this new beginning to reshape our lives.
Can we enhance income or wages by mapping the interconnectedness between consumer behavior? #
While we mine the data of consumers, we spot so many inefficiencies in profiles. People live complicated & integrated lives, yet we engage with them in highly silo’d ways.