Comments to the draft circular “Rationalisation of Merchant Discount Rate (MDR) for Debit Card Transactions”

This blog presents a self-assessment checklist targeted at UI/UX designers and AA product managers, enabling them to surface gaps in the design of their consent artefacts especially in relation to the vulnerable customer.

The new proposals can significantly increase the number of RIAs by relaxing the requirement of having a Master's degree and prior work experience and by lowering net-worth requirements.

Consumer protection in financial services is a core component of Dvara Research’s mission, activities and its advocacy agenda. In this regard, I had the opportunity to participate at Consumers International’s Global Congress 2023, in Nairobi, Kenya, in December 2023.

In this blogpost, we present our comments primarily to the former, but significantly implicating the latter. We include both frameworks since they cover similar subject matter – the creation of an SRO.

Analysing the contents of the Reserve Bank of India’s biannual FSRs and the methodology of the RBI’s supervisory stress tests reveals that there is scope for improvement, specifically regarding the continuity in the tracking of certain risk drivers, the extent of commentary on the information, and aspects of stress tests.

This post presents design elements that providers can use to make the consent artefacts more effective for constrained users. These design recommendations emerge from the insights from an immersive behavioural field study we conducted with 60 constrained customers through a gamified simulation of an AA transaction.