Deepti George

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.

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.

The SDG Agenda, the sovereign debt crisis and the climate crisis will need brave leadership from not just individual governments of both the global north and the south, but also groups such as the United Nations, the G20, G7 and others, to closely negotiate tough decisions that can have enough impact on the triple inequality – of wealth, carbon and power.

Large gaps exist in life insurance coverage in India. The paper examines this issue through a supply-side lens by examining the two key features—the distinction between the agent and the broker model and the alignment of incentive structures with product life-cycle servicing.

Tremendous efforts have gone into creating new authoritiessuch as the Central Consumer Protection Authority.

By requiring only limited public reporting on asset quality, banks in India have enjoyed a level of opacity that banks in other jurisdictions do not

An RBI Working Group has suggested that lending service providers be disallowed from providing credit enhancements such as FLDG (first-loss-default-guarantee). However, a risk-proportionate regulation of FLDG could address its risks, while allowing the ecosystem to benefit from innovation.

In our response, we question the assumptions put forth by the discussion paper for the creation of DBs and the concomitant licensing and regulatory regime.