IIT-MRP, Reserve Bank Innovation hub bank on regional solutions
The objective is to address language barriers, a key challenge in financial inclusion for millions of Indians.
CHENNAI: IIT Madras Research Park (IITMRP) and IIT Madras Incubation Cell (IITMIC) join hands with the Reserve Bank Innovation Hub (RBIH) to drive voice-driven banking innovation.
The objective is to address language barriers, a key challenge in financial inclusion for millions of Indians. The voicebased banking solution aims at performing basic banking transactions through voice-commands in the Indian languages of Hindi, Tamil and Telugu to start with, in addition to English.
Marking the onset of this collaboration, IITMRP, IITMIC and RBIH, in partnership with leading banks, SBI, Axis Bank, Kotak Mahindra and IDFC First conducted the voice banking hackathon ‘Vaulter Voice’ at the IIT M Research Park campus.
It was on the International Mother Language Day, IITMRP announced the voice banking hackathon, inviting students, start-ups and young working professionals.
Out of the 114 registrations received from students and working professionals from across 35+ institutes and colleges across the country, nine finalist teams were invited for a 6-hour hackathon to work on their solutions, where they tested the app developed by them before the expert panel.
Rajesh Bansal, CEO, RBIH said, “There are over 600 million low and middle-income individuals in India without access to digital banking. We aim to help more than half of such underbanked population to overcome their challenges in banking services with voice banking in the next few years”. “The stage is set for voice banking in India. The real need of the hour is developing Indian technology which specifically addresses our regional languages. As part of our ‘Fintech for Inclusion’ initiative, we will look at potentially incubating some of the solutions showcased today, perfect their solutions and work with our partner banks to run a pilot programme or adopt these solutions as part of their banking services. We should be able to roll out a pilot project in around 12-18 months and potentially scale them in the next 2-3 years,” added Prof Ashok Jhunjhunwala, president, IIT-M Research Park.
It was on the International Mother Language Day, IITMRP announced the voice banking hackathon