Publication: Dvara Research

The Reserve Bank of India has opened a discussion in its website to see if there is a case for allowing banks to engage ‘for-profit’ companies as well as NBFCs as their Business Correspondents.

India Post through the decades has been an institution that has permeated the length and breadth of the country through its 155,000 branches.

A lending institution in the inclusive-finance space that is for-profit and for-social good may be making multiple trade-offs where either profit or social good takes the backseat.

Olympia A. De Castro from IFMR Capital gave us an insight on the correspondent banking model in Brazil that led to some interesting comparison debates with the Indian model.

With a vast majority of the Indian population living in the rural hinterland, its economy and growth are linked to developmental efforts. Crucial to this is in ensuring that the fruits of financial inclusion reaches their doorstep.

Understanding and channelizing local issues at the grassroots level to policy makers at both regional and national level is both challenging and vital.

In a recent post, Daniel Rozas and Vinod Kothari have argued that microfinance securitisation does not, in reality, separate ‘pool risk’ from ‘originator risk’ and hence should not be rated very differently from the originator of the portfolio.

Considered alone, development, finance and management is each a vast field, albeit with substantial overlaps among them.

Securitisation of assets by NBFCs came under regulatory purview with draft guidelines being put on the RBI website on June 3rd.

Sucharita Mukherjee and Kirthi Rao talk about the importance of quality of underwriting standards in microfinance institutions. This is the first in a series of articles by the authors on the topic “Unearthing the real issues in microfinance”.