Prevention and self-management of debt for positive mental wellbeing

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

We started our journey as Inicio in 2019 when we identified that the process of assessing affordability for customers in debt was broken and causes massive damage to people's lives, their mental health, their relationships, their life prospects.We set out to understand what it really feels like to live with debt and it drove us to deliver a better solution for businesses to engage their customers at that point of the debt cycle by using cutting-edge conversation AI. That solution is now gaining traction in the B2B market, but we want to go further, and fulfil our potential to transform the lives of people in debt, by helping them to self-manage their situation, prevent them from getting deeper into debt and manage the mental health impacts before creditors start to make things worse.This project is to create a prototype of a pro-active conversational AI agent that people in debt can interact with to help them self-manage their journey before a business directs them to complete the form, massively reducing the stress of interacting with multiple creditors and the mental health issues that occur. By creating a working prototype we can evidence to funders that a self-driven consumer system is technically viable and seek the larger funding required to take the solution to market.Debt is a growing lifestyle disease with 2.5 million people having considered committing suicide due to their debts during the pandemic. As the cost of living crisis bites, more and more families are finding themselves in debt, more commonly without eligibility for benefits, and they need support which is lacking at the early stages of the debt cycle. Only by investing in new technology like this can we hope to support the millions of people facing the impact of debt on their mental health in the coming years.