This post is in response to an article, “Loan Defaults Versus Over-indebtedness in Rural Tamil Nadu”, published on the CGAP blog on June 10th, 2013.

On a recent visit to MFIs working in eastern Uttar Pradesh, we chanced upon some great innovations and field practices, which are clearly taking customer focus to the next level. In this post, I elaborate on the innovation we saw at Utkarsh Microfinance in Varanasi.

India’s regulatory architecture has been driven by the creation of product-specific regulators. We have multiple regulators: Reserve Bank of India (RBI) that regulates savings and credit,

Why does consumer protection assume so much more significance in financial services, more so than perhaps for other services? Financial services don’t have fixed characteristics.

The absence of secondary markets for corporate bonds in India is arguably the single most important reason for this market not seeing the kind of growth one would expect.

The previous post covered the process of “Suitability” in financial services. Here, we cover aspects of the legal and regulatory structure that will aid in establishing an effective Suitability regime in India.

I recently had an opportunity to read an interesting book on farmer suicides in the Yavatmal district of Maharashtra by Secretary Health Meeta Rajiv Lochan1 (meeta29 [at] hotmail.com) and Professor Rajiv Lochan2 (mrajivlochan [at] hotmail.com).

The previous post delineated the Indian context for finance and suitability as part of our Consumer Protection series. This post delves deeper into the conceptual discussions on suitability as the new paradigm for financial sector regulation in India.

The evolution of South African debt market can be divided in four phases. Debt market reforms under phase 1 and 2 were covered in the earlier post as part of our series on Long Term Debt Markets (LTDM). In this post, we shall cover phase 3 and 4 reforms.

As part of the Consumer Protection series, below is the concluding part of the three-part interview with Kate McKee of CGAP.