Publication: Moneycontrol

Insurance companies should align their sales practices to generate the best outcomes for low income households by ensuring easy access to a variety of products with disclosures that provide accurate information.

Protecting citizens’ privacy is a pre-eminent mandate of any data protection regime. The Digital Personal Data Protection Bill appears to have departed farther away from that mandate

The delivery infrastructure that supports social protection is in serious need of upheaval and is fraught with issues such as paucity of access points, operational issues causing transaction failure, and unethical activities like fraud.

More than half the payment failures may be due to incorrect Aadhaar details, or bank accounts that are wrongly flagged as inactive

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.

There is an urgent need to make formal financial services more flexible, and customer centric, in order to increase its usability

Clear statutory backing, clarity of objectives and an independent and professional management are key to the success of a bad bank. These components seem absent in the current structure.

SEBI needs to clearly define who a retail consumer is and ensure that this definition is inclusive enough that it accounts for the universe of consumers that are susceptible to the mis-selling of financial products and services

Solving the identity problem is necessary to enable a shift away from a survival mindset and towards a growth mindset