UPI’s democratised cashless payments but not grievance redressal
Medium-to-low digital proficiency users experience anxiety when they have to use in-app mechanisms to deal with problems. It has got to do with designs that do not account for user proficiency and expectations. A few changes could uplift the experience for all users
Tackling customer protection issues in life insurance for low-income households
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.
Data Protection Bill | Three changes that will sharpen draft Bill
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
How banking infrastructure impacts citizens’ withdrawal of social protection benefits
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.
Backend botch-ups hamper Direct Benefit Transfer payments
More than half the payment failures may be due to incorrect Aadhaar details, or bank accounts that are wrongly flagged as inactive
Banking | Are Indian investors of a lesser god?
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
RBI must accommodate fintech innovations, not ban them
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.
What household finance tells us about financial inclusion in India
There is an urgent need to make formal financial services more flexible, and customer centric, in order to increase its usability
How to get the Bad Bank off to a good start
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.
Finding the common man in the capital markets
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