Affordable smartphones and some of the cheapest mobile data in the world have put app-based loans, insurance, and investments within reach for hundreds of millions of people in India who were previously shut out of formal finance. But having access to financial services is not the same as actually using them.
For many of India’s underserved customers — first-time borrowers, small merchants, and people in rural areas — banking apps are their only option, with no branch to walk into and no one to call for help. But financial jargon, English-only interfaces, confusing screens, and a general wariness of digital finance cause users to give up midway through setting up financial apps. Even when users want to go through with the process, many drop off during onboarding, ID verification, plan selection, or claim filing. Women are hit even harder, given lower average financial and digital literacy. The result we’ve seen is that most digital financial journeys in India never get finished.
A relationship manager built into the app itself
Sending someone in person to help every user does not make sense for small-ticket products, and call centers fall short too, since the person on the phone cannot see what the user is looking at. What people actually need is someone who can see what they see, notice the moment they get stuck, and step in right there, in their own language.
That is the gap RevRag fills. Its product sits inside the apps of banks, fintechs, and other financial institutions, acting like a relationship manager who is always there with the user. Its agents notice when someone is confused, and jump in with voice conversation, plain-language explanations, help filling out forms, and step-by-step guidance, all in the user’s own Indian language. A companion voice-calling feature also follows up with users who dropped off, then hands them back into the guided app experience.
Early results have been strong. One of India’s largest wealth management platforms saw investment conversions double, from six percent to 12 percent, and one of the country’s top digital lending apps cut drop-offs on its lending pages from five percent to seven percent, both confirmed directly with customers. RevRag is also already running inside one of India’s biggest payment apps, a strong sign of how well this kind of guidance can work at scale.
Leveraging AI for impact, not just efficiency
RevRag, Accion Ventures’ latest investment in India, fits well with our strategy of backing AI-first companies that make financial services cheaper to deliver and easier to use for the people who need them most. Beyond helping individual users, RevRag also shows financial institutions exactly where and why people get stuck — data their product teams can use to redesign flows for first-time and thin-file customers, whose credit histories are too sparse for a lender to score. Across the huge number of digital journeys started every year, even a small gain in successful onboarding adds up to a real expansion of access for people historically left out of formal finance.
Why this is different, and hard to replicate
RevRag is easy to file in with India’s crowded voice AI space, but the company is doing something different. Most voice AI companies reach users only after they have already dropped off, through a phone call, with no knowledge of what happened on-screen. While it’s fairly simple for a financial institution to approve using these voice AI follow-up calls, RevRag works differently. Because it lives inside the app and steps in the moment a user gets confused, it requires sign-off from a client’s engineering, security, and compliance teams before it can go live, a much longer process than a normal vendor deal. It is also technically harder to pull off, since RevRag has to make sense of a lot happening at once and in real time: watching what the user is doing on-screen, following what they are saying, and recalling everything it knows about that person from before, then turning all of that into one clear, helpful response in the moment. This kind of access to sensitive financial data also means RevRag has to take data security and privacy seriously. The company does not store any personal data, masks sensitive information before processing, and has invested in the certifications regulated institutions expect. Guiding users never comes at the cost of protecting them.
Looking ahead
RevRag is already live inside some of the biggest names in India’s financial ecosystem, from one of the largest payment platforms to a lending app which recently went public. As it moves from a handful of clients to running across the industry, the impact compounds: a first-time borrower in a small town is talked through a loan application in her own language instead of abandoning it; a rural user learns what an insurance plan actually covers before deciding to buy it; a woman opening her first investment account receives step-by-step guidance instead of quietly closing the app. None of these people needed a branch or a call center — just a bit of help at the right moment, in a language they understand. At the scale of India’s digital finance sector, tailored and consistent help is what finally turns access into real financial inclusion.
