The Indian Financial Automated Advice Bias (IFAAB) Dataset : Auditing Socioeconomic and Demographic Disparities in LLM-Generated Financial Advice in India

Kriti Mahajan

Large language models are increasingly used for financial guidance, yet little is known about whether their advice changes across social identities in Global South contexts. We introduce the Indian Financial Automated Advice Bias (IFAAB) benchmark, a counterfactual audit dataset of 31,734 GPT-4o-generated financial-advice responses for synthetic Indian personas varying by gender, caste, education, employment, residence, age, and district. Holding the underlying request fixed, we evaluate disparities in LLM-implied wealth, income, savings, projected gains, textual similarity, advice topics, and qualitative bias judgments. In the gender-only audit, male-labelled profiles receive 60.1\% higher initial total resources and 46.8\% higher post-advice total resources than comparable female-labelled profiles; in the caste-augmented audit, the post-advice total-resource gap remains 49.4\%. Adding district information reduces the aggregate post-advice total-resource gender gap to 7.9\%, revealing strong geographic conditioning. Standalone caste comparisons also show systematic stratification: relative to General-category profiles, OBC, SC, and ST profiles receive significantly lower…