Abhishek Mukherjee

This blog presents key insights from the second round of the survey report, NAFIS 2021-22, and finds that the rural households’ investment portfolio continues to be dominated by physical assets, which is in contrast with the predominance of formal debt on the liabilities side of the household balance sheets.

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.

 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.

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.

In this blog, we propose a framework for evaluating agent success through a customer protection lens; this can potentially be deployed as a tool to determine agent success while also allowing stakeholders to identify context-specific levers to improve outcomes for the customer.