FINANCIAL CUSTOMER PROTECTION

AN INTERIM REPORT OF OUR WORK UNDER THE CENTRE FOR CUSTOMER PROTECTION

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

We are grateful to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation for entrusting us with a grant under the Customer Protection Program housed at Dvara Research. We thank our advisors for the Program – Anna Wallace, Bindu Ananth, Rafe Mazer and Rajesh Bansal.

We thank the several industry experts and our technical, knowledge and implementation partners with whom we are working to solve pressing customer protection problems and from whom we are learning about the challenges faced by customers of financial services in India.

Executive Director’s Message

Dear Readers,

Dvara Research considers itself to be the voice of low-income households. This has been our mission for 15 years now, and during this time, we have built a strong and credible reputation in research and advocacy positions relating to financial inclusion and financial customer protection. We have worked hard to deliver thinking of the highest quality in these two domains using a systematic and multi-pronged approach. It is this approach and its impact that I would like to call your attention to, as you read this report, whose intent is to showcase our work on financial customer protection.

Research institutions like ours strive to support policy makers in their work. We share their concern for low-income households, and it motivates us to provide them with the information and analysis they need to make policy decisions. We commend India’s government and her regulators for envisioning a robust digital public infrastructure for her citizens.

We recognise that policy making has played a crucial role in enhancing and expanding the access to financial services for low-income households. We also appreciate the enthusiasm with which financial service providers have innovated to accomplish the vision of policy makers.

Past developments in this space such as no-frills bank accounts, a widespread agent network for last-mile cash-out access and an advanced digital payments infrastructure are fast enabling digital peer-to-peer transactions at scale. We do believe that the growth of digital financial services have a positive impact on the Indian economy, and we consider ourselves fortunate to be a part of this digital journey.

In our work, we listen intently to government officials and regulators on issues they worry about, and we focus our efforts towards helping them deliver on their mandates for consumer welfare.

We employ a variety of approaches, including one-on-one meetings, stakeholder conversations, participation in various fora, and the continual finetuning and updating of our work priorities and commitments to reflect the most pressing needs of low-income financial services’ customers and the most impactful directions for solution-discovery.

We publish our thinking in a variety of formats, such as blogs, reports, opinion pieces and journal articles, that we make available to all stakeholders in the industry and policy-advocacy networks. In doing so, we seek to communicate to stakeholders the tremendous importance of customer protection as an integral and constitutive feature of meaningful financial inclusion.

That our contributions are valuable in this regard is evidenced by the recognition we have received from well-established domestic and international organisations in the development and financial inclusion domains, ranging from multilateral agencies, non-government thinktanks, private funders and donors, consumer advocacy organisations, as well as researchers and public intellectuals. We have earned the trust and respect of these stakeholders as the go-to experts in financial customer protection. We are invited to many fora to bring views from the customer protection lens, but more importantly we are also helping to create and expand the number of fora where financial customer protection gets its rightful place as an important theme in the larger narrative, so that the quality of discussions that ensue at those venues is thereby deepened.

We also bring in a focus on customer protection by giving it a seat at the table when we are consulted on various themes by external stakeholders, be it by researchers looking to understand the nature of problems that low-income customers face, or consumer behaviour specialists operating in the private fintech, payments and banking sectors, or members of industry bodies, financial service providers, regulators, and others.

Through a carefully chosen portfolio of impactful action-research and solution-testing, we will continue to bring our repertoire of skills and strategies to bear in raising the bar for customer protection in the financial inclusion domain.

We are keen to engage far more with financial service providers to help them achieve customer safety and satisfaction, as our insights can help providers in fuelling innovative product design and delivery. In all its research efforts, Dvara Research strives always to maintain an independent voice that speaks for the low-income household and household enterprise, and its ability to perform this function is significantly enhanced by its commitment to disseminate as a pure public good all the intellectual capital that it creates.

Sincerely,

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Dvara Research considers itself to be the voice of low-income households. This has been our mission for 15 years now, and during this time, we have built a strong and credible reputation in research and advocacy positions relating to financial inclusion and financial customer protection.

Advisors

Consultants

Our Perspective

Advocacy for Financial Customer Protection

Comprehensive Customer Protection

Monitoring and Diagnostic Tools

Other Projects

BNPL Customers Are Susceptible To Adverse Risks

Buy Now, Pay Later (BNPL) products have become one of the popular modes for customers to make retail purchases in India. These products have been positioned as challengers to credit cards that can make credit more accessible to customers at little to no cost. Yet, the actual costs customers may incur have not been documented in the Indian context. Dvara Research’s report on BNPL attempts to fill this gap. Concluded in late 2022, the report finds that customers using BNPL incur monetary costs comparable to costs of using credit cards, and are susceptible to adverse risks emerging from gaps in customer protection.

Click here to read our other writings!

Leveraging Social Capital For Public Health Insurance

Leveraging social capital to enhance the customer experience of public health insurance programs – This project maps a customer’s journey through public health insurance programs, identifies potential hurdles that the customer may face in benefiting from those programs, and provides examples of how social capital can be put to work to overcome those challenges. Once completed, this project can provide a useful lens for evaluating public health insurance programs from a customer perspective, and aid in developing community-driven solutions to customer challenges.

Click here to read our other writings!

About Dvara Research

Dvara Research envisions a world in which every low-income household and every enterprise has complete access to suitable financial services and social security through a range of channels that enable them to use services securely and confidently. We identify ourselves as the voice of low-income customers. They are the reason we exist, and we are relentless advocates for their financial wellbeing.

Since 2008, Dvara Research has deeply analysed, and carefully written about, financial inclusion and social protection in India from policy, regulatory, and practitioner perspectives that are anchored to its mission. Its work has gained the admiration and respect of policymakers and regulators, and since its inception, Dvara Research has been a research-partner of choice for such key policy-making bodies as the Reserve Bank of India, Securities and Exchange Board of India, Pension Fund Regulatory and Development Authority etc.

Our work at Dvara Research is categorised into four verticals that conduct transformative research into the various aspects of financial inclusion and social protection. These four verticals are – Financial Systems Design, Future of Finance, Social Protection, and Household Finance Research. The Customer Protection Program, launched in November 2021, is a horizontal program that overlaps across all the areas of work that we do.

POLICY INITIATIVES

Financial Systems Design

Household Finance

Future of Finance Initiative

Social Protection Initiative

Centre for Customer Protection