Boosting Financial Literacy in Young Adults through FinSage: An Interactive AI Platform

Financial illiteracy is a large issue, particularly among young people in developing economies. In India, only 16.7% of students possess basic finance skills, so we must find innovative ways to teach the subject. Our paper introduces FinSage, a chat-based AI system that teaches teens, young adults, and students about money. Using Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG), FinSage provides personalized finance lessons via chat, images, and impactful real-life advice. The platform features a Together AI-driven backend that retrieves data from various sources to generate accurate answers. In a four-week pilot with 20 users, we observed significant improvements in financial literacy scores (42.7% increase), with risk assessment showing the highest gain (at 90.6%) and product selection (74.4% improvement). Our research contributes to the growing field of educational technology and financial literacy by demonstrating a novel RAG-based approach, evaluating how effectively conversational learning applies to finance, and offering a flexible method to integrate financial skills into higher education. Our findings indicate that AI-driven conversational learning can effectively bridge gaps in financial knowledge among digitally savvy youth.