Center For Customer Protection

For two decades, India has doubled down on the policy prescription of providing financial ‘last-mile access’ to its rural and poor citizens. Has the effort succeeded? It depends on who you ask.

This will inspire more consumer trust, and enhance transparency among agents

The paper starts by revisiting existing literature on the financial lives of LIHs that shows that they manage their finances in a rather sophisticated manner. This can be traced to the radical uncertainty they face, which includes a “triple whammy” of income problems and expenditure shocks that are frequent and unique to their circumstances.

The white paper discusses a set of solutions for the ecosystem of actors to consider in tackling and curbing the illegitimate activity of scamsters and other fraudulent actors over the very popular Unified Payments Interface (UPI) of India.

The 2016 Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code (IBC) is a landmark legislation with the potential to impact every borrower. This paper focuses on Part III of the IBC, which deals with natural persons, proprietorships, and personal guarantors for corporate debt. Through the paper, we attempt to estimate the potential consequences of the Fresh Start Process (FSP) defined under this Part. The IBC lays out economic criteria that can qualify (or disqualify) an applicant for FSP. Under FSP, a borrower must be asset-lite, have a low income, and hold minimal outstanding debt to qualify. These thresholds determine the applicability of the process once the IBC is fully notified. Thus, empirical estimates regarding the effects of the provisions on the Indian credit market are crucial to deciphering the impact of the IBC, more specifically, the FSP.

Insurance is a hard sell anywhere in the world, but more so in developing countries like India, with a population that is predominantly low-income and largely informal. Life insurance, in its current form, came to India through the Europeans (1818) and was slowly Indianized. However, it was the nationalisation of life insurance and the state backing provided to the Life Insurance Corporation of India

Business correspondent (BC) agents are crucial last-mile infrastructure that support India’s vision for efficient, population-scale delivery of financial and other government services using Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI). These agents primarily facilitate cash deposits, cash withdrawals (together known as cash-in cash-out or CICO), and optionally facilitate access to insurance, savings products, and various welfare schemes for rural and low-income India.

Policymakers should go beyond economics to look at sociological and anthropological aspects of how women negotiate finance.

In an increasingly digitized world, Digital Financial Services (DFS) have emerged as a key tool for transacting, borrowing, saving, and investing. Policymakers and Financial Service Providers (FSPs) are keen to leverage DFS to advance financial inclusion, particularly for women from Low-Income Households (LIHs).

 Our response covers two themes: Leading from a customer protection perspective, our comments emphasise the need for the prospective SRO to have duties towards the customers, at par with responsibilities towards the regulator.