Consumer protection in financial services is a core component of Dvara Research’s mission, activities and its advocacy agenda. In this regard, I had the opportunity to participate at Consumers International’s Global Congress 2023, in Nairobi, Kenya, in December 2023.

India needs a robust and comprehensive financial customer protection regime, which it currently lacks. Imagine the following scenario. Raja and Rani are a low-income householder couple with two children in elementary school. They also take care of Raja’s ailing mother. The household’s monthly income is ₹20,000.

There is consensus about the importance of financial inclusion. This has translated into efforts to increase the level of financial access from the financial sector firms as well as through policy initiatives. Among the financial sector initiatives, the most visible has been the growth of the FinTech platforms.

In this blogpost, we present our comments primarily to the former, but significantly implicating the latter. We include both frameworks since they cover similar subject matter – the creation of an SRO.

In this deck, we discuss some factors influencing life insurance take-up, the problem with endowment life insurance for the low-income segment, and how better disclosures could be the first step in helping households choose the right insurance product for them.

In the following sections of this blog, we discuss the unique and complex financial lives of these households to set the context for product and process designs, delve into what a savings product for not just women but Low-Income Households (LIHs) in general could look like, and highlight some of the insights from various kinds of financial service providers on the challenges and opportunities in operationalising such a savings product for this segment. 

In the first blog in our trust series, we laid down the contours of trust. In this blog, we attempt to unpack what the proximate grounds for trusting Digital Financial Services or DFS may be.  Trust is the most cited motivator for the adoption of digital financial services or DFS (Kajol et al., 2022). Lack […]

The Insurance Regulatory and Development Authority of India (Insurance Products) Regulations, 2023, hereafter "Draft Regulations", was released by the Insurance Regulatory and Development Authority of India (IRDAI) in December 2023.

Higher capital adequacy norms locking up funds

Advancing women’s financial inclusion is a key policy objective for both advanced and emerging economies. Providing access to formal finance is seen as an important lever in helping poor women seize economic opportunities and build a resilient future for themselves and their families.