This program focuses on solutions that speak to the changing landscape of issues pertaining to financial customer protection in India. It studies how institutional practices in customer protection can build trust and confidence to increase uptake and usage of formal financial products and services among low-income, rural, and women consumers.
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In this note, we discuss how the difficulty of selling life insurance led to bundling insurance with savings2, how such bundling can be sub-optimal, and why such products are popular despite adverse customer experiences. We then make a case for providing relevant, complete, and comparable information that can aid suitable product decisions, sale, and persistence. We also offer a template for what such a Customer Information Sheet could look like.
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.
India needs a robust and comprehensive financial customer protection regime, which it currently lacks. Imagine the following scenario. Raja and Rani are a low-income householder couple with two children in elementary school. They also take care of Raja’s ailing mother. The household’s monthly income is ₹20,000.
In this deck, we discuss some factors influencing life insurance take-up, the problem with endowment life insurance for the low-income segment, and how better disclosures could be the first step in helping households choose the right insurance product for them.
In the following sections of this blog, we discuss the unique and complex financial lives of these households to set the context for product and process designs, delve into what a savings product for not just women but Low-Income Households (LIHs) in general could look like, and highlight some of the insights from various kinds of financial service providers on the challenges and opportunities in operationalising such a savings product for this segment.
Advancing women’s financial inclusion is a key policy objective for both advanced and emerging economies. Providing access to formal finance is seen as an important lever in helping poor women seize economic opportunities and build a resilient future for themselves and their families.
These fraudulent messages have proliferated during the pandemic, where fraudsters induce panic or excitement that impairs the customers’ ability to think clearly.
This research presents a framework comprising nine principles, which we believe are pre-requisites for creating user-centric GRMs.
In all our research efforts, we strive to maintain an independent voice that speaks for the low-income household and household enterprises. Our ability to perform this function is significantly enhanced by our commitment to disseminate as a pure public good, all the intellectual capital that we create.
