Gadgets
JioPhone Next Can Unleash a Credit Revolution Across the Globe
An answer has come from iSPIRT, a small band of policy influencers quietly setting up technology standards for India’s digital markets, inducing firms to enter new, open-network markets from online payments to healthcare.
The Bangalore-based group is championing a fresh set of players — account aggregators — to unlock a much sought-after prize: Bringing into the folds of formal credit the 80 percent of adults in developing countries (40 percent in rich nations) who don’t borrow money from traditional institutions.
But these people and their micro enterprises are increasingly online thanks to innovations like JioPhone Next. They’re paying rents, rates and utility bills and receiving payments on their smartphones, scattering their footprints all over the Internet. Account aggregators will gather those digital crumbs for people to share their own data in a machine-readable format for a bank loan application.
Introducing a layer of consent managers is important. Emerging-market borrowers can have many types of accounts-based relationships. Yet they can be useless to banks if they can’t present a composite picture of their financial lives to access formal loans that get monitored by credit bureaus. More than three-fifths of India’s adult population is either invisible to credit scorers or not considered worth the trouble by standard lending institutions.
In an advanced economy like the US, services such as Experian Boost and LenddoScore help narrow the subprime borrowers’ visibility gap by getting them to voluntarily submit their utility or video-streaming bills to demonstrate creditworthiness. But in an emerging market with low financial literacy, banks would rather leave the bottom of the pyramid to lenders who know the borrower in real life or have some social leverage on her — such as micro-finance firms that lend to groups of women.
Conversely, tech platforms, intimately aware of their customers’ online behaviour, can match them with loans, collecting fees while leaving risks with the banks. Jack Ma’s Ant cornered nearly a fifth of China’s short-term consumer debt before Beijing broke up the game.
Not every country can afford to bring out the heavy artillery against its private sector: Politics wouldn’t allow it. Aggregators can be a much softer tool for keeping the lending market fair, giving banks a reasonable economic chance to compete with data-rich tech giants.
Take JioPhone Next. It will spew out data about a large segment of sparsely banked population. Jio, Ambani’s 4G telecom network, will capture some of it as subscribers of its cheap data plans buy groceries from JioMart, an online partnership with neighborhood stores across India. Google will also get valuable data about users’ location and search queries. Facebook will exploit its own knowledge, as the social media giant adds to its half-a-billion-strong Indian customer base for WhatsApp and a growing craze for Instagram Reels, a video-sharing platform. Unsurprisingly then, Google wants to influence India’s deposit market, and Facebook is nibbling into the small business loans pie.
When it comes to real-time data, banks can never match the platforms’ clout. But account aggregators’ snapshots can help them catch a break.
Just enough additional data that will tell them if a customer is more creditworthy than suggested by a low (or no) credit score can make a big difference to profit, especially as banks won’t have to pay hefty fees to the likes of Jio, Google or Facebook for their proprietary assessments. By owning and explicitly sharing their data, customers will avoid getting trapped in the tech industry’s biased algorithms. Tiny enterprises will be able to show their cash flows to lenders by pooling everything from tax payments to customer receipts. Once telecom firms come on board, an affordable “buy-now-pay-later” plan on a refrigerator purchase will become possible for a low-income family that pays its phone bills regularly .
Aggregation, being a utility, will be like tap water to platforms’ Evian, and be priced accordingly. Who will own the pipes? Walmar’s PhonePe, which runs India’s most popular digital wallet, has received an in-principle approval to be an aggregator from the central bank. Eight banks, which between them account for 48 percent of all accounts in the country, have agreed to use the framework, which went live Thursday.
It’s a good start. Banks desperately need some help to stay in the money game. Or they’ll just go crying to regulators and ask them for special protections against Big Tech. That would hurt experimentation and delay the credit revolution that $50 (roughly Rs. 3,650) phones can unleash.
“At Xbox, we believe that with better tools, creators can make even more extraordinary games,” Haiyan Zhang, GM, Xbox Gaming AI, said in a blog post. “This partnership will bring together: Inworld’s expertise in working with generative AI models for character development, Microsoft’s cutting-edge cloud-based AI solutions including Azure OpenAI Service, Microsoft Research’s technical insights into the future of play, and Team Xbox’s strengths in revolutionizing accessible and responsible creator tools for all developers.”
The aforementioned AI design copilot is a toolset that will help game designers turn prompts into scripts and dialogue trees. In contrast, the character runtime will enable dynamically generated plot beats and quests. We’ve already seen heavy AI integration in games by way of procedural generation — a more recent example being the 1000+ planets in Starfield. Not to mention, enemy AI has been around for way longer.
Inworld made headlines in August when it launched a modded story mode for Grand Theft Auto V, Sentient Streets, in which players had to investigate the rise of a bizarre AI-worshipping cult — a segment loaded with characters that spoke in AI-generated dialogue, on the fly. The mod was later taken down by publisher Take-Two, leaving a permanent strike on the creator Bloc’s YouTube channel. As per The Verge, Inworld’s AI technology can also be used for narration in top-down RPGs to warn players about any events awaiting off-screen and respond to questions like we’ve seen in the past year with AI chatbots like ChatGPT and Bing Chat. Microsoft has also been heavily banking on artificial intelligence, having made a $10 billion (about Rs. 83,254 crore) investment in OpenAI. The company has also integrated AI tools into its popular suite of services and also added an AI copilot to Windows.
Despite being a Microsoft-affiliated AI toolset, it would be interesting to see whether titles using them will be allowed to thrive on other platforms. In July, Valve claimed that it would be cracking down on games that included AI-generated assets if the developer didn’t own the copyright to the piece of art. For the uninitiated, when you insert a prompt to create something in AI, the software simply repurposes existing assets found online and mushes them together — basically stealing from other artists and writers without appropriate commercial licenses. Infringing them would lead to the game not being distributed on Steam, forcing the developers to seek proper licenses for the asset by reaching out to the AI companies involved. It’s unclear how Microsoft’s partnership will play out — as long as AI content is being used as a catalyst to innovate and create something new, it should be fine.
In a post on X shared by BSNL’s Andhra Pradesh (@bsnl_ap_circle) unit, the company confirmed that BSNL users can upgrade their older 2G or 3G SIMs to a 4G SIM for free. Not only will the upgrade be free, but a promotional image shared with the post suggests that users who opt for the upgrade will also receive 4GB of free data that will be valid for three months. It is speculated that BSNL is aiming to boost its upcoming 4G services with this offer. The announcement was first spotted by Telecom Talk.
To access the free data offer and the free upgrade, BSNL users are requested to get in touch with executives at BSNL’s Customer Service Centre, franchisee or retailer stores, or contact one of their Direct Selling Agents (DSA). The promo image also adds in a finer print that the offer is available with certain terms and conditions, but hasn’t detailed any, so far.
Reliance’s Jio recently launched the 4G-supported Bharat B1 feature phone in India. The handset is priced at Rs. 1,299 in India. Alongside 4G connectivity, the phone comes with JioCinema and JioSaavn applications pre-installed.
The Jio Bharat B1 is equipped with the JioPay application, which is said to allow users to make UPI payments. Aiming to increase accessibility, the phone supports 23 languages overall, including multiple regional languages.
Realme, via Weibo, announced the arrival of the Realme GT 5 Pro in China. The display of the handset is confirmed to offer 3000 nits peak brightness. It has also been teased to offer heat dissipation with a surface area of around 10,000mm2. It is confirmed to ship with Qualcomm’s new Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 SoC. The post doesn’t specify the exact launch date of the smartphone, however, given the release of the teasers, the launch could be just around the corner.
The Realme GT 5 Pro has been in the news a lot lately. It is expected to feature a 6.78-inch (1,264×2,780 pixels) AMOLED display and is tipped to come in 8GB, 12GB, and 16GB RAM options along with 128GB, 256GB, 512GB, and 1TB inbuilt storage options.
For optics, the Realme GT 5 Pro is said to have a triple rear camera unit comprising two 50-megapixel sensors and an 8-megapixel shooter at the rear. The camera setup might include a Sony LYTIA LYT808 sensor, an OmniVision OV08D10 secondary sensor, and a Sony IMX890 telephoto sensor. For selfies, there could be a 32-megapixel sensor at the front. It is said to carry a 5,400mAh battery with support for 100W wired charging and 50W wireless charging.
The Realme GT 5 Pro is expected to come with upgrades over Realme GT 5. The latter was launched in China in August with a price tag of CNY 2,999 for the base model with 12GB of RAM and 256GB of storage.
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