Dibu

ABOUT ME

Ph.D. student at IITM - Has helped banks and MFIs better understand their customers thus making banking more accessible. I'm a final year Ph.D. student in the Department of Management Studies at the Indian Institute of Technology Madras, primarily working on banking (including microfinance) related problems, and trying to find solutions to them using tools from the analytics and machine learning universe. Tagged along with my supervisor Dr. Nandan Sudarsanam, we primarily look into understanding, as opposed to just predicting, the repayment behavior of customers of financial institutions that provide loans. We try to use a modified Hidden Markov Model approach to clustering repayment sequences and decipher various actionable business insights from this exercise. This work is being done in association with partners from the industry. This study is a segue from another assignment, where we worked closely with the IFMR Finance Foundation (IFF) on a framework for quantifying loan prepayments on a fixed scale over the duration of a micro-loan. We were awarded the NSE-IFF Financial Deepening & Household Finance Research Initiative grant worth $10,000 under the Researcher Practitioner category for this work. We have also worked on scoring and understanding the behavior of customers of Kshetriya Gramin Financial Services (KGFS), a rural financial services delivery model designed and owned by IFMR Rural Finance and promoted by the IFMR Trust. I have also had a short internship stint with the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab in Chennai working on analyzing Tamil Nadu health insurance claims data to assist policymakers to come up with better solutions for improved health care access. Prior to joining the Ph.D program, I was working with Prof. G. V. Anand at the Indian Institute of Science Bangalore on developing robust algorithms for detecting acoustic sources in the shallow oceans. These projects were primarily funded by the NIOT and the Naval Research Board. In general, I am somebody who loves to play with data and work on solutions to problems that have a social impact.

SKILLS