Conditional GAN-based synthetic financial modeling for street vendors in India’s informal economy

Swachha Sisir Das (), Sasmita Mishra () and Zefree Lazarus Mayaluri ()
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Swachha Sisir Das: C.V. Raman Global University
Sasmita Mishra: C.V. Raman Global University
Zefree Lazarus Mayaluri: C.V. Raman Global University

Digital Finance, 2025, vol. 7, issue 4, No 3, 653-677

Abstract: Abstract Street vendors in India’s informal economy remain largely excluded from digital finance due to severe data scarcity, undocumented income streams, and minimal participation in formal financial systems. This exclusion is compounded by low digital literacy, sporadic earnings, and persistent reliance on cash transactions—particularly in Odisha, where the informal sector dominates urban employment. As a result, financial institutions struggle to extend inclusive services such as credit and insurance to these underserved communities. To address this challenge, we propose a generative AI framework based on conditional generative adversarial networks (cGANs) to simulate realistic financial behaviors from limited vendor data. Trained on transaction data from 1000 urban vendors, our model generates synthetic profiles conditioned on socio-demographic attributes, achieving high fidelity (Fréchet distance = 10.12) and behavioral diversity (entropy = 3.59 bits). Augmenting real-world datasets with these synthetic records improves loan-default prediction by 3.2% and anomaly detection by 2.9%. The framework incorporates fairness-aware training, maintains demographic parity (deviation

Keywords: Generative adversarial networks; Synthetic financial data; FinTech inclusion; Informal economy; Street vendors; Digital financial modeling; Fairness auditing; Socio-technical validation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C63 D14 G21 O17 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
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DOI: 10.1007/s42521-025-00145-4

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