Category: Report

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.

MFIN India and Dvara Research partner to gather insights on users’ experience of navigating the MFIN-Customer Grievance Redress Mechanism (MFIN-CGRM). The study deploys mixed methods — a primary survey of over 300 users, stakeholder interviews and desk research to understand the user-centricity of the MFIN-CGRM.

In this interim report, we document our observations about the user interface of In-App GRMs in UPI applications (UPI Apps). Our observations are based on our review of the customer redress journey on these GRMs – mainly in terms of the GRM’s accessibility and usability – from the lens of a low-income, digital immigrant customer.

Technological advancement is enabling governments to break away from this fragmented model and adopt an approach that allows individual departments to share infrastructural capacities. In policy parlance, this new approach is referred to as an ‘ecosystem-based’ delivery model, wherein several government departments are integrated at the back end, operate on the same platform, with their workflows interoperable with each other.

Access to credit enables an individual and her household to achieve financial well-being and results in economic welfare outcomes for the entire society. However, excessive debt diminishes all developmental gains, and negatively impacts overall economic growth and stability.

Despite significant policy support for financial inclusion, there is little evidence about what has been achieved by way of knowing which households and individuals are financially included, or what is the impact of such inclusion on these persons.

There are several reasons for low take-up of life insurance policies in general and specifically low take-up of term life insurance. These factors range from supply side barriers such as misaligned incentive structures for agents selling life insurance policies, lack of availability and accessibility to a larger suite of life insurance products customized to the needs of low-income households to demand-side barriers such as household’s contextual factors that limit their awareness and priority for a life insurance product and their behavioural preferences pertaining to life insurance products.

In this study, we conduct a quantitative analysis of household finance data to understand the status of health insurance ownership in India, identify the determinants of health insurance ownership, and understand the relationship between households’ access to health insurance and their health expenditure.

In this paper, we characterise the National Health Insurance system of Israel, its universal public healthcare system, as one which has adopted managed competition and achieved remarkable outcomes. We place the establishment of the system in the country’s political-economic context to determine the role of the structural factors in shaping health policy in the country.

Buy Now, Pay Later (BNPL) products have become one of the popular modes for customers to finance their retail purchases. BNPL products are being postured as challengers to credit cards that can make credit more accessible to customers at little to no cost.