Tech Applications to Educate Rural Women on Financial Services

Accenture (NYSE: ACN) and Grameen Foundation India have collaborated to develop two new applications that help overcome the barriers to financial services adoption among women and other low-income populations in India.

Leveraging artificial intelligence (AI) and augmented reality (AR) technologies, the applications help users better understand financial products and services, enabling them to make informed choices that positively impact their financial and social well-being.

Grameen Foundation India plans to roll out the applications across 300 villages in the states of Maharashtra and Odisha.

Accenture Labs in Bangalore began working with Grameen Foundation India last year as part of its broader corporate citizenship focus on using Tech4Good.

[ दिल्ली के स्कूलों में शिक्षा का गिरता हुआ स्तर और उसमें सुधार का प्रयास ]

Leveraging its expertise in emerging technologies – including AI, AR, speech recognition and computer vision – coupled with Grameen Foundation’s expertise in human-centric design and e-learning to solve the problems of poverty, two applications were developed:

Emotional Analytics for Social Enterprises (EASE) – an AI-based web and mobile app that helps microfinance advisors gain real-time insights on the emotional and cognitive status of their clients, based on video and audio inputs.

Helping to improve cross-cultural communication, the tool provides deeper insights on precisely what topics or key words attract attention, or cause clients to disengage.

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For instance, the tool could help detect whether a woman applying for a loan is being pressured to do so by someone else – making it an unnecessary burden, or whether she would find it to be of genuine use.

Grameen Guru – a smart phone-based multi-lingual chatbot that leverages AR technology to help clients who can’t read understand written materials. Using the app, a user can hold their phone over a brochure that details available financing options, for example, and the Guru virtual assistant will pop up and prompt a conversation in the local language to explain the material.

The new applications are built on Grameen Foundation India’s e-learning platform, G-LEAP, which is being used by more than 1,000 frontline microfinance workers who have trained and equipped over 58,000 women beneficiaries to use digital financial services.

Photo courtesy: Grameen Foundation India