ChatiBank: Streamlining Financial Services for Older Adults and Disabled Individuals

Developers Raman, Nic, Puri, Jae and Jing Jie Introduction: The challenge posed by modern UIs and applications used in digital banking for senior citizens and older generations can be addressed by the NUS Fintech Society's project, ChatiBank. This project simplifies the digital banking experience by providing a user-friendly and intuitive chat-only interface on top of DBS Digibank. Through a human-like conversational interaction platform, ChatiBank enables all users to easily access banking services. Motivation and Problem: Numerous older individuals find digital banking services hard to comprehend and use, due to the lack of familiarity and simplicity that was commonly found in the past. As a result, these individuals have difficulty in availing of banking apps. Furthermore, current chatbots only deliver limited information and do not serve as real service agents. Therefore, senior citizens need an easier and more user-friendly solution to engage with banking services without any trouble. ChatiBank is designed with user-friendliness in mind, allowing seniors to access essential banking information and services through a chat interface. By replicating the experience of speaking to a human teller in a physical bank, ChatiBank seeks to eliminate the complexities of traditional user interfaces. Utilizing user prompts and macro-driven web bots, ChatiBank is able to interpret conversational requests and turn them into banking actions. Our team faced difficulties in determining the range of services that could be changed into chat interactions. After deliberation, we established that transfers (account, PayNow, bill) and knowledge related to investments (portfolio, FDs, mutual funds) are suitable for conversion to a chat-only format. When attempting to make web banking operations automatic with chatbots, we faced some difficulties such as bot recognition, timing out, and the varying effectiveness of web drivers. In the end, the crew opted to employ undetected-chromedriver and Selenium as the most suitable way to achieve these objectives safely and productively. Given that ChatBank is presently being trialed in a safeguarded local setting, collaborations with real banks would be required before rolling out the solution on a large scale. Security is a principal focus, especially when integrating systems like ChatGPT, and collaborating with renowned banks would guarantee the security of private user details. ChatiBank uses a combination of GPT-4, Selenium, and Streamlit to create a chat-only interface for DBS Digibank's website. Message passing and macro-driven web bots are able to understand user inquiries and perform banking activities. The model produces a {ServiceWanted} tag when it necessitates a system action to be taken. This tag is parsed by the system, prompting it to carry out the required task. The conversation then resumes. We have incorporated a few-shot-prompting approach with 6 example services to further facilitate the comprehension of action flow. Selection of Model:Our selection of GPT-4 as the underlying model for ChatiBank is based on its proficiency in conversing effectively and producing accurate replies in a chat-like manner. The investment for running ChatiBank with GPT-4's base model entails both input and output costs per dialogue. Assuming an average of 20,000 input tokens and 500 output tokens, the cost works out to around 63 cents per conversation. ChatiBank has revolutionized digital banking with its chat-only interface tailored to the needs of senior citizens, as well as those who are looking for a more user-friendly experience. Its human-like interactions bridge a gap in usability, making modern banking accessible to everyone. Subsequent Steps: 1. At the moment, the app provides 5 IBanking functions, such as transferring to PayNow, transferring to DBS/POSB, transferring to another account, and PayNow topping up. We aim to venture into bill payments and develop a more sophisticated investment feature which can combine and show data from the DBS Invest Tab.

Source: https://medium.com/@eyelessrhyme7/chatibank-simplifying-banking-for-seniors-and-differently-abled-62e7a3e5329b?source=rss------fintech-5