Conversational Commerce

Chad, Ghana, Mali, Niger, etc. peak in both illiteracy and poverty. In every underdeveloped and developing country, illiteracy plays a major restriction to financial penetration. In Bangladesh, MFIs, mobile banking services, and banks suffer from this massive challenge. Our AI particularly helped the likes of Hishab, BRAC, DYDF, Nagad (Leading Mobile Banking Service),  Shonali Bank and Rupali Bank. The issue they faced included that of reach, onboarding, and successful follow-ups. 

Even with only 20% illiteracy, Bangladesh Bank has dubbed it, alongside awareness, as the leading reason for the lack of small enterprises. Illiteracy blocks people from reading leaflets, makes them more susceptible to fraudulent and predatory contracts, and makes it significantly difficult to follow up.

Tech saviness is also affecting the mobile banking industry with Nagad claiming this caused 39% lower transactions. It takes a lot of steps to complete complex transactions.

Campaigns of phone has shown much success in Bangladesh, but that requires the MFIs to have the SMEs contacts. It is much more viable for SMEs to find the right organization based on their goals and contact them. But with 12M SMEs in India and 400k in Bangladesh, the presence of a mediator to connect to the right funding + informing the whole terms + onboarding manually is quite unsustainable.

In South Asia + Africa (our target geography) the illiterate and non tech-savvy communities are quite receptive with speech technology as seen by our recent collaboration with DATABD.co in creating voice surveys. 

We provide a single API that can make financial apps or call systems conversational and can be customized on demand. We actually have six highly efficient tools in the back end:

1) Speech To Text in any Language (Made for Finance Industry)

2) AI Powered Strong Search Engine

3) AI Powered Strong Recommendation Engine

4) Entity Recognition

5) Intent Recognition (BETA)

6) Voice Identification

It can be used in the following scenario:

a) Sourcing: If the government offers a single phone number for SME financing like 1919. SMEs can tell about the business type, name, geography, and consent for receiving funding calls.

b) Onboarding: Onboarding on any Mobile Banking app can be done without access to higher technologies. A chatbot simply asks about things like name, the keyword (recognizes the voice), voter's ID, etc

c) Transacting: A great value is that certain keywords spoken by the recognized voice can transact to specific contacts saved within the same mobile app.

d) Tracking: SMEs need not make separate sheets and send after intervals to MFIs. Simply going to the app or making a call with item number and amount can be made to update the database of the lender for tracking.

e) Recommendation: The SMEs can be recommended via app and call based on auto criteria matches without human intervention through AI.

f) Verification: SMEs can search AI verification through app or call which beats time and money for manual verification requests.

g) Awareness: A chatbot that can be asked about financial terms

This is a major opportunity for Socian AI to enable funding organizations break through the limitations of literacy and understanding. Our corpus is as big as OpenAI but is industry specific making the perfect solution.

We are tapping in the population with lower literacy rates, usually marginalized or neglected for funding. Access to AI sourcing removes all sorts of financial bias and increases the scope of a local SME to reach the right funding partner. Onboarding can be significantly easier, and so can the post-lending/investment tracking. The conversational AI, through empowering these segments, can maximize financial inclusion and technological penetration.

We saw massive impact opportunities in diligence and automation by leveraging text. Thus, former Microsoft PM Tanvir H. Sourov created the first AI startup in Bangladesh, where the impact was needed the most. As our CEO, he leads the whole startup with 7+ years of AI experience. He also became the country's leading Founders' Institute Member, and Chairman of I4.0 in E-commerce Association of Bangladesh, and the AI lead of most aspects of government projects under the Prime Minister's Office.

Joining as our CTO was the Aspire To Innovate (a2i) chief architect of identification processes under Bangladesh ICT Ministry, Md. Asif Atick. He particularly realized the issue with identification and automation through his 20+ years of experience and found how easily many of them can be solved with AI.

Our co-founder and COO directly worked with many MFIs, including DYDF. With amazing understanding of AI and being and being a strategic expert he joined our company. The COO Adib Ahnaf now works actively for these segments in Rotary and also is a philanthropist. 

All our technologies in this sector are ready and only need to be packaged and deployed. As we serve 20+ industries including Telco, Electronics etc, many technologies were left in the pipeline as completed and were never fully deployed. However, we served Hishab with an API for voice transactions which serves 10,000+ clients.

Partnerships: We seek partnerships with organizations that offer finances/financial services where the conversational partnership can be vital. This may include banks, mobile banking platforms, microfinance institutions etc. 

Incubation: We require some incubation from financial experts on how to adapt it to be customized on the needs and policy specific to the country.

Fundraising Referrals: We are currently raising seed with a whole lot more on our plate through conversational and interpretive AI. We would love if MIT Solve could connect us with potential investors. Here's the deck

Conversational AI makes communicating and acting easier for every end without intervention. It eliminates literacy, language, and tech-savviness barriers. Plus, complex operations can be done with a single sentence, which can be very confusing and time-confusing otherwise. All these can build a driving force with further financial inclusivity. Conversational commerce can catalyze commercial governance and security, and offer easier accessibility across all major industries.

The model is dialect and industry agnostic, making it fit for a very wide range of purposes

Within 1st Year:

200% Increased (Total 5.9 Million) Mobile Banking Users in Bangladesh.
This is achieved via our existing partnership with Nagad who showed massive interest for conversational mobile banking. They estimate this can capture an 8 M user market.

6M Transaction (Near 50% Increase) of Mobile Banking in Bangladesh
Estimate provided and can be achieved through our partnership with Nagad (second largest Mobile banking service), Bkash (largest mobile banking service) and potential partner Upay (third largest mobile banking service)

Up to 80% Acceptability of Financial Surveys

Conversational surveys mean more reach in lesser time. It can replace the voluntary factors of online virtual surveys and the manual entry factor of approached surveys. We have partnered with Lightcastle Partner's DATABD.Co to run a conversational financial survey pilot with amazing results.

Within 5 Years:

Total SME Funded Increase by 100%

If we can broker a deal with the govt it means easier SME sourcing for conversational phone lines, easier interactivity for conversational transaction and more awareness for conversational automated consultacy.

Mobile Banking Users & Transactions after Deployment:

1) Total Accounts

2) Monthly Transaction

3) MoM Transaction Increase

4) Monthly Transaction in Remote regions of Bangladesh (Chittagong Hill Tracts)

Surveying At Pilot:

1) Input Accuracy (96%)

2) Input Accuracy in Unknown Dialect (92%)

3) Input Accuracy in Mixed Language (96%)

4) Formatting Accuracy (90%)

5) Successful Surveys without Intervention (70%)

6) Successful Surveys with 1-5 Edits (22%)

7) Surveys with 5+ Edits (8%)

8) Acceptability of Voice Surveys (100%)

Theory of Change:

1) Conversational AI Interaction and Transaction > Easier Usage & Lower Restrictions > Increased User of Financial Services > Financial Mobility and Inclusivity Increase.

2) Conversational Surveying > Reduced Time > Higher Acceptability > Easier Sourcing and Data Interpretation

Supporting Evidence:

Businesses with conversational commerce see a 10% increase in revenue. Every industry with conversational penetration has shown good results.

Bangladesh and other developing countries citizens are very acceptable of newer technologies if it doesn't come with barriers of technical literacy. The acceptability of Dial-in Mobile Banking by Bkash (30% of total transaction) shows that these customers are very much willing to utilize a product if there's no technical complexity. 

Reducing survey time has been directly associated with lower reluctance. Only 10% of customers at best voluntarily respond to online surveys. Approached surveys physically by surveyors typically have a 60% response rate. Based on responses and survey time periods, we deduce a 20% increase to the response rates.

Natural Language Processing:

1) Automated Speech Recognition

2) Identity Recognition

3) Entity Recognition

4) Intent Recognition

The usage of certain stacks including Twillio allows creation of mobile based APIs. Our tech works on mobile phone basis with or without internet. Customization and automation are made on a central portal but all user data is encrypted with blockchain technology.

Our workplace integrates diverse perspectives and skills into a very fun workplace with space to play basketball. We design experiences based on the employee themselves. With people from different ethnicity and career stages, we offer a flexible workstyle. Our computers automatically lock after office period for employees. Those still in universities get maximum support, assistance and flexibility from us.

We offer bundled or individual of these products:

1) Commercial Text To Speech and Speech To Text

2) Commercial Transaction System

3) Commercial Chatbot

4) Commercial Recommendation System

5) Commercial Dial-in Chatbot

6) Commercial Surveys

There are separate bundles that offers these technologies in combined form. We will start with mobile banking service providers due to higher leverage and pre-existing partnership. We will move to the insurance providers and finally banks.

They are provided as APIs that can be integrated with 8 lines of codes and customized on demand within the 9th line.

The APIs are sold at 1000$/mo + customization charges. The Pay-per-use methodology can actually get very unstructured as the range is high with mass individuals. Our approach is to serve MFIs and SMEs only through Government as otherwise the product is unaffordable. A financial institution should have access to 100,000+ users for direct purchase.

We have so far achievedd 80,000$ in revenue through these servies.

While the whole company is not solely focused in financial inclusivity, we have generated 1M$ in revenue (contract value included) and have raised 225,000$+ from the likes of Maslin VC, IPE Capital etc. We are currently raising seed where these ends are included at 2.4M$/16% equity.