The Coach Inside Your Banking App — Alisha Chowdhury on Closing the Advice Gap with AI

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.”Timestamps00:00 Welcome and Introductions01:22 Alisha’s Founder Roots02:38 From New Orleans to Finance04:48 Career Path and MBA Pivot07:35 What Kiro Money Builds10:19 AI Agents and Product Vision12:27 Trust, Emotion, and Community17:36 Safety Guardrails and Testing22:12 Impact Metrics and ClosingMore 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 One Vision Podcast is a fintech, banking, and AI podcast hosted by Theodora Lau (Founder, Unconventional Ventures; author of Banking on (Artificial) Intelligence). One Vision goes beyond the headlines on AI, agentic commerce, digital banking, financial inclusion, and the future of money — with founders, analysts, venture capitalists, technologists, and operators building the next chapter of financial services. New episodes weekly. Featured guests include leaders from Ant, bunq, J.D. Power, Forrester, IBM, Microsoft, Salesforce, SAS, SAP, and Wall Street Journal. Recognized in American Banker's Top 20 Most Influential Women in Fintech. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.