Our comments to the Draft Guidance on Regulatory Expectations for Data Governance

This report presents a brief synopsis of the methodology and anonymised findings.

The study followed 293 women in rural Rajasthan over 6 months, documenting more than 135,000 financial transactions while introducing assisted access to a UPI-based mobile payments application through community-based women facilitators.

The Draft Guidance proposes broad regulatory expectations for model risk management across the model lifecycle. It intends to strengthen governance, oversight, risk management and controls of Regulated Entities (REs) using models (including AI / ML models). In this response we present our comments to the Draft Guidance, through six recommendations

This paper provides a conceptual framework for citizen- centricity, breaking it down into system- level design features. It provides case studies of three SP- DPIs in the Indian context, and surfaces crucial learnings about their design.

As algorithmic systems increasingly shape financial decisions, this blog explores how they can de-humanize individuals by reducing them to data points.

India’s financial inclusion story over the last decade has been remarkable, with dramatic expansion in account ownership and sustained growth in credit. Yet, evidence increasingly points towards a gap between access and impact as witnessed in high rates of dormant accounts and the ongoing NPA crisis in the microfinance industry.

The study was conducted in two contrasting geographic contexts of rural Punjab and urban Tamil Nadu, using qualitative research methods involving 30 WNEs.

Access to suitable credit could enable growth-oriented nano-enterprises to invest in productive assets, adopt new technologies, smooth working capital cycles, and expand their scale of operations.

Our submission in this paper is that impact measurement in financial inclusion, i.e., financial health measurement can, and ought to, play a more diagnostic role in financial inclusion strategy. This is the conceptual departure that the title of the paper describes as the shift ‘from a canary in a coalmine to a thermostat’.