With around 400 million unbanked individuals in the region, can we look to AI to hasten financial inclusion among our underserved communities?
A young and thriving startup backed by HSBC – with a track record of working with leading financial institutions in the region – InsightGenie has a grand vision to empower the unbanked population with innovative AI-powered solutions.
Formerly known as Bizbaz, InsightGenie is this year’s winner of the FinTech category at the Elevator Pitch Competition (EPiC) 2024 hosted by HKSTP.
We decided to find out more about the startup’s vision and the solutions from Vincent Choy, Co-Founder, InsightGenie, with additional perspectives from Eric Or, Acting Chief Corporate Development Officer, Head of Ecosystem Development, Hong Kong Science & Technology Parks Corporation (HKSTP).
How is AI technology impacting the unbanked and underserved communities in Southeast Asia?
Vincent Choy: AI technology has greatly improved access to financial services. From the work that we do in providing credit risk assessment to the unbanked and underbanked, to advances in digital identity verification and fraud detection, AI has brought down the cost of serving the unbanked and underbanked, making it financially viable for banks and other financial institutions to serve the market.
How does InsightGenie bridge the gap in establishing credit profiles for unbanked communities without historical transaction records?
Choy: The core technology of our product is a proprietary behavior prediction model enabled by AI. It can take input from multiple data sources and types and build a predictive score called the Genie Score.
A credit profile seeks to answer a straightforward question, “What’s the likelihood this individual will repay their loan?”
Legacy systems are built on the assumption that past performance is a predictor of future performance. The assumption is, that if they have paid in the past, they will pay in the future.
However, with 400 million unbanked individuals in the region, many work in agriculture or run micro/small businesses in rural areas. Under traditional credit scoring methods, these individuals often lack formal bank accounts or transaction records, making it difficult for them to access banking services as financial institutions cannot verify their financial histories.
Unlike traditional credit assessment methods, a 50-second voice segment enables us to generate a Genie Score.
Modern data sets and the application of behavioral science means that we are able to evaluate real-time factors such as physiological biomarkers, and biometric data from the voice to assess authenticity, emotional stability, impulsiveness, conscientiousness, and loan suitability.
Furthermore, by focusing on voice wave patterns rather than speech content, InsightGenie overcomes language and dialect barriers, enabling the creation of credit profiles for underbanked individuals.
This innovative approach allows us to create credit profiles for individuals without bank accounts, with limited banking access, or with established banking relationships.
How do you help financial institutions anticipate customer behaviors, to enable them to acquire new leads and reduce bad debts?
Choy: One of our clients, which is one of the largest banks in Indonesia, reported a 28% average increase in approval rates within 3 months and at the same time increasing the repayment rate by 10%.
Financial institutions that rely solely on legacy credit systems are unable to access the 400 million people who are unbanked or underserved.
Our innovative Genie Score does not use legacy credit histories, that don’t exist for these populations. Instead, we assist financial institutions in creating risk profiles by evaluating finances, health, lifestyle, and social presence. Through personality and voice-based evaluations, we help clients assess loan compatibility, resulting in a more precise credit scoring system that incorporates diverse data sources.
Our streamlined method expedites the credit scoring process, reducing approval wait times for borrowers. This approach not only helps financial institutions reach new unbanked customers but also minimizes the risks of defaults and bad debts.
What is your strategy for developed financial markets such as Hong Kong and Singapore?
Choy: The Genie Score is a high accuracy behavior prediction engine that will augment and improve business decision-making regardless of the application.
In established financial hubs such as Hong Kong and Singapore, we see a plethora of time and financial inefficiencies because decision-making is still guesswork instead of being made using more modern behavior analysis.
Employers in Hong Kong and Singapore have expressed concern in the rising cost of employment due to churn. To help alleviate the situation, we have been working with them to implement well-being alerts that are triggered when signs of depression, anxiety and burnout are detected. This enables employers to take rapid action to ensure employee well-being thereby limiting churn.
We also see opportunities in healthcare as interventions are more effective when detection can happen earlier. Our video assessment tool can predict heart disease risk, stroke risk, oxygen levels, and more by analyzing a 30 to 40-second video of you looking into the camera. This technology can be implemented into existing healthcare/telemedicine applications used across mature and emerging markets.
There are wide-ranging applications of this technology for health insurance providers within these two markets.
Eric Or: HKSTP is committed to providing diverse support to high-potential start-ups, accelerating the commercialization of their unique and innovative ideas, and serving as a ‘super-connector’ – linking local and international industry partners and investors.
Our aim is to assist companies like InsightGenie to leverage Hong Kong’s exceptional business environment, international reach, and strategic location in the Greater Bay Area to access global markets.
How is InsightGenie leveraging – or will leverage – HKSTP’s extensive network as well as Hong Kong’s R&D infrastructure to expedite predictive AI’s application in financial institutions and beyond, to further its vision of financial inclusion?
Choy: We are thrilled to have won the FinTech category at the global Elevator Pitch Competition (EPiC) 2024 in April this year organized by Hong Kong Science and Technology Parks Corporation (HKSTP), underscoring the successful application of our predictive AI technology in financial inclusion which further elevates the InsightGenie brand internationally.
Since winning the recognition at the EPiC 2024 event, the HKSTP team has been tremendously helpful, be it providing us with pivotal guidance in scaling up our business, or generously connecting us with new business prospects, ecosystem partners and R&D collaborators.
We’re happy to share that we were recently successfully admitted into HKSTP’s Acceleration Programme. This will allow us to leverage their broad investor network, secure additional financial backing, and access guidance on enhancing a scalable business model for expanded regional and global reach.
At the same time, our aim is to enhance the predictive accuracy and precision of our models. In advanced markets like Hong Kong, obtaining labeled data is more feasible as HKSTP facilitates our collaboration with local partners, ecosystem allies, and academic institutions, enabling us to effectively refine and improve our models.
By creating more accurate risk profiles based on thorough examination of individuals’ psychometric data and various digital traces, we empower and enable financial institutions and FinTech companies with comprehensive insights, effectively facilitating the acquisition of new customers, and in turn, promoting financial inclusion.
