Zeta: Solving financial literacy through AI

Recently participated in hackathon organized by IIT Ghandhinagar and IIEC(their startup incubator), they recived 200 individual appications, and from them they only selected 50, and the best part which i liked was team was formed by them, so there was little suprise element with new team, and all were random dudes, some guy was from pune, hydrabad, IIT bombay etc…

let’s start from some stats to get how bad the situation is, and does it even matter to solve it:

Problem

• 43% of Indian adults use digital payments, but usage is lower among women and rural populations (World Bank Global Findex Database 2021)
• Only 17% of young adults (15-34 years) in India are financially literate (NCFE-FLIS 2019)
• Merely 24% of the eligible working population covered under various pension schemes (PFRDA Annual Report 2021-22)
• 3,596 cases of digital banking frauds reported in 2021-22, with ₹155.9 crore losses (RBI Annual Report 2021-22)

But Why??

• Government is providing pension and schemes every year
• RBI prompting financial awareness using various ways (ads, regulations and what not)

“Still people fall into fraud and debt trap”

Reasons

• Lack of Formal Education.
• Traditional gender roles affecting women’s access to financial decision-making.
• Limited awareness of digital banking services among certain demographics.
• Exposure to fraudulent schemes and scams in the absence of proper financial education.
• Difficulty in accessing financial information in regional languages.
• Generation gap in digital literacy, hindering adoption of online financial tools.

Solution:

So We decided to divide the problem according to the target audience, and we came up with 2 solutions:

Our target audience was:

• Tech Savvy(mostly Urban)
• Non-Tech Savvy(mostly Rural)

Both of them have different problems, and we decided to solve them using different approaches.

Tech Savvy Audience

They already know how to use mobile to everything, but still they don’t care enough to learn about financial literacy, they care about this after getting scammed, but that’s what we want to avoid, and still google seo and ads are fucked up in some sense, you mostly end up getting misinformation than getting some useful information.

So peer to peer community is best for this solution, where one can share their experiance, and connect with them, and cuz it’s community misinformation can be stopped through moderation and other people.

• We first get background information about and literacy level(rough idea) from user:
• Gamified Community based platform:
• Reputation based moderation

Normal Audience(mostly Rural):

They don’t know how to use any app or touch screen phone, and for them it is huge learning cuve!

so

Why not leverage what they already have & know how to use very well

they already know how to use their keypad phone, and know how to call!

Demo:

Still we know that this llms and ai agents based solution is not perfect, but it’s a start, and we can improve it over time, and we are open to feedbacks and suggestions.

For this we are working on feature to transfer call to actuall human during mid call using function calling.

Main benifit of this is they can get information in their own language, and they can ask any question they want, and they can get information in real time 24x7.

Technical Architecture:

Because we wanted to get low latency as much as possible, running llama on local or on any gpu server will still be slow, so we used GROQ(blazing fast cuz of lpu)

I mostly worked on the backend part and on the LLM(with lokesh), i don’t like that much frontend, so other 3 guyes handled frontend, i created simple python script for call microservice, and used twilio for call handling.

Scalability of solution

• Because of Community and call based approach our solution not only covers urban and tech savvy users but also covers rural area and people who don’t know how to read/write.
• As more users joins community, answers and quality of discussion becomes it’s own moat, it becomes harder to spread misinformation.

Impact

• More people would benefit from government schemes.
• Reduce of misinformation and scams.
• Illiterate people can benefit from this without any barrier.
• Gamified approach for courses and quiz leads to more engagement, better knowledge transfer.

and we won the hackathon🥳

Hackathon Experience:

• What a beuatiful campus they have, i really fell in love with it, the hackathon was for 2 days, and we were provided with food and stay, and there was non veg option also, and all were super chill!
• I really love how humble everyone was, like we were in middle of the hackathon and it was lunch time and someone comes and requests us multiple times that the caterian guys want to wrap up can you please take lunch, and we ignored like we will take it later, he comes multiple times with same humblness, and in the last i got to know that he was the director of the IIT GN, and he was so humble, and i really loved that.
• Yes, thay have very good swimming pool, i really enjoyed swimming their
• Got to meet many students from other IIT & clgs, and exchanged ideas and thoughts.
• So many small small details which were there and taken care which was very small but made our experiance really good, like there was this uncle whoes job was to make hot choclate and coffee, and he didn’t go home for 2 days, he was there all days with us, we even said we will do it ourselves but he denied humbly.
• There was all night cab service, if anyone wants to go to hostel or come to research park(they were rally far from each other).

I guess that’s it all!

PS: look ma, i am in the news :)