Independent Research and Policy Advocacy

Towards designing UPI services for constrained users

This blog post summarises literature regarding users who are most likely to face difficulties in using digital payments, and some design principles and best practices that could simplify digital payment interfaces.

Payment Failures in Direct Benefit Transfers

Our recently concluded State of Exclusion study finds that payment failures during the back-end processing of a Direct Benefit Transfer (DBT) payment are a significant concern. In this blog piece, we highlight the broad takeaways to help the reader better understand the landscape of payment failures.We also set out some broad recommendations to be taken into consideration by the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) to improve the chances of a successful DBT payment.

Incremental Adoption of Managed Competition in Germany

In this paper, we document the experience of Germany’s SHI system with managed competition and the challenges faced by this sub-system in faithfully implementing the principles of managed competition as originally envisioned by Enthoven.