The Coach Inside Your Banking App — Alisha Chowdhury on Closing the Advice Gap with AI
The Irish Tech News PodcastShow Notes
Many people in this country don't have access to reliable financial guidance — so they're increasingly asking a free chatbot instead. The problem? A general-purpose model trained on Reddit threads inherits Reddit's appetite for risk, and now that skew shows up in the conversations people are having about their money. In this new episode of One Vision Podcast, Alisha Chowdhury, Founder of Kiro Money, joins Theodora Lau to argue that the same technology, pointed with different intentions, can do the opposite: close the advice gap instead of widening it. Alisha traces the origin of Kiro back to a socioeconomically diverse Bangladeshi community in New Orleans — the "aunties and uncles" who taught her immigrant parents how to navigate an unfamiliar financial system — and to the University of Pennsylvania, where she saw real wealth and learned how it's built for the first time. After years as an investor at Vanguard and in private equity, she left for an MBA in London and started building the earliest version of Kiro: a low-code, RAG-based coach fed only sources she trusted. "Not garbage in." Today Kiro is an embedded financial intelligence layer that lets a bank or investing platform drop a context-aware AI coach directly into its own app, so users get guidance where their data and their relationship already live. A conversation about financial inclusion, the advice gap, and what it takes to build AI for money that people can actually trust. Because when it comes to money, trust has to be earned — and tested.
🎧 Listen now wherever you get your podcasts.
Keywords: AI, Fintech, GenerativeAI, AI Agents, Chatbots 📍”The vision of why I started this is to give back to people like my parents, is to give back to a younger version of myself, and making sure that access truly means access.”
Timestamps 00:00 Welcome and Introductions 01:22 Alisha’s Founder Roots 02:38 From New Orleans to Finance 04:48 Career Path and MBA Pivot 07:35 What Kiro Money Builds 10:19 AI Agents and Product Vision 12:27 Trust, Emotion, and Community 17:36 Safety Guardrails and Testing 22:12 Impact Metrics and Closing
More about our guests 🌐Alisha Chowdhury on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alisha-chowdhury-163808122/
More about our host and One Vision Podcast 🌐Theodora Lau on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/theodoralau/ 🌐Banking on (Artificial) Intelligence (book): https://www.bankingonaibook.com/ 🌐Unconventional Ventures (company): https://www.unconventionalventures.com/ 🌐Listen to all One Vision Podcast episodes by visiting: https://shows.acast.com/one-vision
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