The winding road from financial access to financial outcomes
India’s financial inclusion numbers are often presented as a policy success story. The Reserve Bank of India’s (RBI) Financial Inclusion Index increased from 64.2 in 2024 to 67 in 2025. Bank accounts, credit, digital payments, and insurance products have all scaled significantly over the past decade. By nearly every access metric that is traditionally tracked, the story looks like unambiguous progress.
The big truth about nano-enterprises that dominate MSME segment
MSME segment is mammoth and has very distinct and crucial subcategories. Responding to this heterogeneity can spur momentum across the entire sector
Comments to the Draft Guidance on Regulatory Expectations for Data Governance
Our comments to the Draft Guidance on Regulatory Expectations for Data Governance
Key Findings – A Mechanism for Market Monitoring of Customer-facing Issues with Unified Payments Interface (UPI)
This report presents a brief synopsis of the methodology and anonymised findings.
Digitising Women’s Money Management
The study followed 293 women in rural Rajasthan over 6 months, documenting more than 135,000 financial transactions while introducing assisted access to a UPI-based mobile payments application through community-based women facilitators.
Comments to the Draft Guidance on Regulatory Principles for Model Risk Management, dated 24 June 2026
The Draft Guidance proposes broad regulatory expectations for model risk management across the model lifecycle. It intends to strengthen governance, oversight, risk management and controls of Regulated Entities (REs) using models (including AI / ML models). In this response we present our comments to the Draft Guidance, through six recommendations
Reflecting on the ‘citizen centricity’ of social protection DPIs: three case studies
This paper provides a conceptual framework for citizen- centricity, breaking it down into system- level design features. It provides case studies of three SP- DPIs in the Indian context, and surfaces crucial learnings about their design.
Bringing the human back into algorithmic systems: From ‘de-humanization’ to ‘re-humanization’
As algorithmic systems increasingly shape financial decisions, this blog explores how they can de-humanize individuals by reducing them to data points.
Rethinking financial health for meaningful impact
India’s financial inclusion story over the last decade has been remarkable, with dramatic expansion in account ownership and sustained growth in credit. Yet, evidence increasingly points towards a gap between access and impact as witnessed in high rates of dormant accounts and the ongoing NPA crisis in the microfinance industry.
Advancing Women’s Entrepreneurship: The Role of Digital Money Management Tool
The study was conducted in two contrasting geographic contexts of rural Punjab and urban Tamil Nadu, using qualitative research methods involving 30 WNEs.
