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In today’s fast-paced world, financial literacy is more crucial than ever. Even so, many people worldwide struggle to manage their finances effectively. That is the reason for the creation of Finance Buddy, a platform powered by Generative AI (GenAI). The goal is to change this scenario by providing personalized financial insights and tools that make complex financial data easy to understand, therefore changing the financial reality of the users. With the growing demand for personalized solutions, Finance Buddy addresses this need with a differential that is the merge of financial management, education, and gamification.

Personalized Financial Insights with GenAI

Finance Buddy’s main feature is its ability to use GenAI to analyze users’ financial data – such as income, expenses, debt, and savings – and transform it so that the user can relate better and be more responsible for its financial management. The platform will create dynamic stories to help users understand their financial health and make informed decisions, which differs from traditional tools that simply display numbers. Because of that, no matter if the goal is to track expenses, predict savings growth or offering customized advice, Finance Buddy will be able to output a comprehensive view of their finances.

Financial Literacy at Its Core

Another primary goal is to financially educate users. To do that, the platform will offer personalized educational content based on each user’s financial profile and knowledge level. This will guarantee that users will learn at their own pace. Besides that, to generate more value, it will feature interactive modules and quizzes to increase engagement, while the AI adapts lessons to match users’ evolving needs. This positions the platform as a transformative tool in the fintech space, since not just financial management is being offered, but also education.

Gamification for User Engagement

To increase user experience, there will be the use of gamification. Users can set financial goals, track their progress, and earn rewards as they reach milestones. This motivates users to stay engaged with the platform and take active steps toward improving their financial health by crating a sense of achievement when breaking down financial goals into smaller achievable ones and offering a visual perception of progress.

A Scalable, Freemium Model

Finance Buddy will be a freemium model. It will offer basic features for free, like setting goals and seeing expenses, while premium features – such as advanced financial insights and custom financial projections – will only be available through subscription. This strategy aims to let the platform more accessible for more kinds of users, from young professionals to more financially savvy individuals. Finally, a scalable white-label solution will be offered for financial institutions. It can be customized to fit their needs, driving additional revenue streams and inflow of more end-users to the platform.

In conclusion, Finance Buddy will use of GenAI in an innovative way to provide personalized financial insights, summed with its focus on financial education and engagement, which sets it apart in the fintech space. With its scalable freemium model, it’s poised to revolutionize the way individuals manage and understand their finances.

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It is undeniable that Artificial Intelligence can change many areas of a person’s life: professionally, academically and personally. The question is, how expert can it be in each of these fields?

After the popularization of AI, I personally started using these tools for the most different areas of my life to be more efficient, creative, assertive and precise (Brynjolfsson et al., 2017). From ChatGPT to develop texts to Suno to create music and DALL-E to create image. Academically, AI helps me to verify, develop and hone my ideas. Professionally, it helps me to get new jobs, prepare for interviews, solve real life problems, write code – sometimes in programming languages I don’t even know how to code. Personally, the functions go from me making personalized drawings to put on the cover of my Spotify playlists to asking to develop texts to LinkedIn posts and to solve many other personal needs.
One of these needs was in the second half of 2023, when me and another Brazilian friend needed a plan for an “eurotrip” during New Year’s Eve. Since none of us were comfortable in planning a trip to a continent that was not ours, I had the idea of asking ChatGPT to be a travel agent (Chung et al., 2015) and give recommendations of places to go and to help plan the trip. It not only made the whole itinerary, but also personalized it to exactly what me and my friend were looking for.
The power ChatGPT has goes beyond giving standard answers to the users’ questions. It reaches a level of personalization based on iteration never seen before. Each time it gave me a travel idea, I could say “I prefer warmer countries” or “I’d like to try mediterranean food”, or even “now I want to add two more countries that will be low budget”. Then, after choosing the countries – England, Spain and Portugal –, it helped me to choose the hotels, the dates, the flight companies and the must-see places in each of these countries. Apart from that, it even made a day-to-day itinerary with the main points. The trip would not have been the same without its help.
It is truly mind-blowing to think that a tool so powerful such as ChatGPT could help me with something so specific and be expert at the same time (Dwivedi et al., 2021). The fact that it can be an expert in so many other areas at the same time means that people must incorporate it to their lives to outsource the operational tasks and be able to focus on living life at its fullest, being more productive, efficient and using the “acquired” free time to whatever suits them better.

References:
Brynjolfsson, E., & McAfee, A. (2017). The business of artificial intelligence. Harvard Business Review. Retrieved from https://hbr.org/2017/07/the-business-of-artificial-intelligence

Chung, N., & Koo, C. (2015). The use of social media in travel information search. Telematics and Informatics, 32(2), 215-229. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0736585314000513?

Dwivedi, Y. K., Hughes, D. L., Ismagilova, E., Aarts, G., Coombs, C., Crick, T., … & Williams, M. D. (2021). Artificial Intelligence (AI): Multidisciplinary perspectives on emerging challenges, opportunities, and agenda for research, practice, and policy. International Journal of Information Management, 57, 101994. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S026840121930917X?

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A lot is said about the benefits of artificial intelligence and digital disruption, but it is equally important to bring light to its risks and how they can be mitigated.

It is undeniable that digital disruption has transformed entire industries since the Web 1.0 around 1989. It offered new opportunities for growth and efficiency while opening new markets. However, with these advances and mass adoption, also significant risks are unintendedly created, from privacy concerns to cybersecurity threats, and need to be addressed by companies and societies.

Cybersecurity Threats
Companies are adopting digital technologies in order to increase efficiency, but as a collateral effect, they expose themselves to greater cyber risks. The Colonial Pipeline ransomware attack in 2021, for example, showed how vulnerable critical infrastructure systems can be. Businesses rely each time more on new technologies, but are often unprepared, generally underestimating the importance of more robust cybersecurity strategies (Alotaibi, 2020). In the rush to innovate, companies might be sacrificing security for speed.

Social and Economic Impacts
One important feature of digital disruption is automation. This advance that increases efficiency while decreasing margin for human error, also tend to displace jobs in sectors like manufacturing and retail. AI and machine learning are unstoppably replacing human labor at an unprecedented rate, increasing inequality. For workers without digital skills, the opportunities and perspectives are each time fewer (Autor & Salomons, 2018). Businesses and society should have a responsibility to reskill workers and counter this inevitable consequence of progress.

Loss of Privacy
Another major concern is that privacy may be threatened as digital platforms collect vast amounts of personal data. A strong example of such risk is the Cambridge Analytica scandal, which showed how data misuse potentially have relevant impacts on democracy and trust in technology (Zuboff, 2019). Privacy regulations should be more strictly enforced globally as companies use data more than ever to fuel targeted advertising and personalized services.

Monopolization and Market Domination
Digital evolution is somehow an exponential process, which means that the more technologically advanced a company is, more successful it tends to be, leading to even greater investments in technology. This leads to monopolization, with tech giants like Google and Amazon being able control entire markets and making it extremely hard for new players to solidify their businesses. This raises concerns about competition, innovation, and consumer choice (Furman et al., 2019). Smaller and younger digital businesses have a hostile market to perform into.

These are few risks amongst several others. Technology must be praised, incentivized and rewarded as they impact positively entire societies. However, it is of great importance to also have the responsibility to assess its emerging collateral risks as they have the potential to impact negatively in the same magnitude. What measures do you think governments and businesses take in order to tackle those risks while continuing to innovate?

References

Alotaibi, S. (2020). The impact of digital transformation on cybersecurity: A case study of the Saudi Arabian banking industry. International Journal of Advanced Computer Science and Applications, 11(5), 238-244.

Autor, D. H., & Salomons, A. (2018). Is automation labor-displacing? Productivity growth, employment, and the labor share. Brookings Papers on Economic Activity, 2018(1), 1-87.

Zuboff, S. (2019). The age of surveillance capitalism: The fight for a human future at the new frontier of power. PublicAffairs.

Furman, J., Coyle, D., Fletcher, A., McAuley, D., & Marsden, P. (2019). Unlocking digital competition: Report of the Digital Competition Expert Panel.