For families with special needs children, planning for their future and meeting their current needs are the two most critical aspects of their job.
Via a groundbreaking collaboration, QIU has joined forces with Fintech company MyFinB to develop Malaysia’s first A.I platform for families with special needs.
Called Better Life, Optimisation of Money (BLOOM), the platform assists parents to plan their children’s financial needs based on key expenditures categories including food, transport, education, housing and more. It is slated to be launched in the first quarter of 2020.
BLOOM will help monitor children with special needs’ financial demands while predicting future expenditure and income levels. Most importantly, it will prescribe strategies on how parents can achieve their financial goals with suggested action steps across the short, medium and long term.
This system profiles and analyses these families’ current and future requirements; with access to curated and customised information pertaining to autism such as help centres, counsellors, financial advisors, psychologists, educators and more.
According to M. Nazri, President/Founder of MyFinB and Centre of Excellence in AI Innovation (CE.AI), the platform will provide concrete steps for families to become financially sustainable while managing the daily needs of their children with special needs.
“In addition, the marketplace platform connects parents with specialists and experts based on the specific requirements of each family,” he said.
QIU Dean of the Faculty of Science and Technology Professor Dr Vilasini Pillai said the system would help policymakers to devise and implement programmes in accordance with the government’s aspirations as per the 11th Malaysia Plan 2016-2020 and the National Strategy for Financial Literacy 2019-2023.
“Parents or caregivers of SNC face challenges in setting aside adequate finances for themselves and their children,” she said.
“The BLOOM system will provide parents and caregivers with short, medium and long-term strategic plans that ensure their financial goals are achieved and their children with special needs will be taken care of up until they fend for themselves.
Ridzuan Aziz, Co-Founder of CE.AI and President of the Fintech Association of Malaysia noted that using AI would enable the households with SNC to have better lives by guiding them with specific outcomes.
“In Malaysia, this is much needed and the only way to do this is to leverage on digitisation,” he said.
BLOOM is part of a special scheme under the Digital AI Labs (DIAL) by MyFinB so that every organisation can now own A.I.
For this project, QIU provides its methodology and subject matter expertise in the financial planning for special needs children field to contribute towards the system development while MyFinB produces the AI algorithms and automated narrative engine.
