We produce blogs to discuss new research findings, ongoing projects, and even personal reflections on the research process. Our blogs are written for a variety of audiences, including other researchers, policymakers, practitioners, financial service providers, grassroots organizations, impact investors and the public. The format is simple and easy to grasp. The language is straightforward, and the tone is non-academic. Our blogs can be of varying lengths. We choose to write a blog when we don’t want to do a full- fledged study or follow a rigorous research process. Blogs may contain opinions and they can also be based on experiences. Some of our blogs may just share some observations, learnings, or challenges.
The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) has been publishing its bi-annual Financial Stability Reports (FSR) from May 2010. The FSRs provide extensive information about the way the RBI conducts its stress tests on the banking system; an aggregate sense of the results of such tests provide a measure of the overall resilience and stability of […]
Ideas on how to benefit from the account opening momentum and make progress on usage as well.
A closer look at recent Payments Banks KYC and conduct violations.
Part 1 of a two-part series on the learnings and takeaways from a Household Finance course.
Data and trends of digital payments in India.
A few insights from the field on possible reasons for low account usage.
Insights from the India sample of the Global Findex 2017.
The troubles of the banking sector, and public sector banks (PSBs) in particular, are well known. Reform proposals have focused largely on ownership and have issued strident calls for privatization. Even if there was political support for this idea, there are a few important challenges.
The rationale stated by RBI was that this would level the playing field between foreign and domestic banks with regard to these targets, which it does indeed, albeit to the extent that in the short term, now foreign banks may also have to follow strategies similar to those of their domestic counterparts to build their loan books for these subcategories.
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.
