Prevention and self-management of debt for positive mental wellbeing

2019年，我们开始了作为Inicio的旅程，当时我们发现，评估债务客户负担能力的过程被打破了，对人们的生活、心理健康、人际关系和生活前景造成了巨大损害。我们开始了解背负债务的真实感受，这促使我们为企业提供更好的解决方案，通过使用尖端的对话人工智能，在债务周期的这一点上吸引客户。这种解决方案现在在B2B市场上越来越受欢迎，但我们希望走得更远，发挥我们的潜力，通过帮助欠债者自我管理自己的处境，防止他们陷入更深的债务，并在债权人开始使事情变得更糟之前管理心理健康影响，来改变他们的生活。该项目旨在创建一个主动对话式人工智能代理的原型，债务者可以与之互动，帮助他们在企业指示他们完成表格之前自我管理自己的旅程，从而大大减少与多个债权人互动的压力和发生的心理健康问题。通过创建一个工作原型，我们可以向出资者证明，一个自我驱动的消费者系统在技术上是可行的，并寻求将解决方案推向市场所需的更多资金。债务是一种日益严重的生活方式疾病，在疫情期间，有250万人因债务而考虑过自杀。随着生活成本危机的影响，越来越多的家庭发现自己负债累累，更普遍的是没有资格获得福利，他们需要在债务周期的早期阶段所缺乏的支持。只有通过投资这样的新技术，我们才有希望在未来几年帮助数百万面临债务对心理健康影响的人。

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.