Enabling Equal Finance Access for Rural Customers in India

Shashi Jain of the Indian Institute of Science in India in collaboration with Uma Urs from Oxford Brookes University in the United Kingdom along with colleagues from Akaike and Kotak Mahindra Bank also in India, will build a GPT-enabled AI bot called SATHI, which stands for Scheme, Access, Training, Help, and Inclusion, to deliver information on the latest government financial schemes that support sectors, like micro-enterprises and farms, to potential customers and providers in rural and suburban India. Together with several partners, they will capture data and provide context to SATHI to enable it to answer queries related to financial schemes. They will also use a translation module so it can understand voice queries and respond with an audio answer in the local language. They will perform a field test at a bank branch to compare the use of SATHI alone with a human financial expert and with semi-experts supported by SATHI. They will collect data on customer satisfaction and their follow-up actions using standard field research methodology, including oral interviews and survey questionnaires.