Mr N Vaghul, chairman emeritus of ICICI Bank, recently delivered the Talwar Memorial Lecture on the topic “The Future of Finance in India”.

As a welcome step, SEBI released a circular for AMCs requesting them to regulate distributors. This is the first time distributors of mutual funds in India will function in a regulated environment within a structured framework.

(This is the first of a series of posts titled “Understanding the KGFS Customer”. The authors will attempt to understand the lives of enrolled customers of Kshetriya Gramin Financial Services (KGFS) by exploring the datasets in the Customer Management System (CMS) being used at KGFS.

The first IFMR Conference on Financial Systems Design was held at our office in Chennai on Aug 5-6, 2011. The objective of the conference was to engage in an in-depth conversation on the future of the Indian financial system and some of the underlying design challenges being faced in various markets.

Subsequent to our earlier posts detailing the three broad themes from the IFMR Financial Systems Design Conference 2011, Day 2 of the conference witnessed participants identify pathways to achieve the specific visions that were formulated across the sessions in Origination, Risk Transmission and Aggregation.

The structured finance approach has given MFIs access to a new class of debt investors, thereby reducing over-dependence on traditional sources of funds. This therefore enables risk transfer over a larger gamut of financial institutions and also provides access to mainstream capital market investors. The need for continuous and reliable sources of capital is critical for growth and sustenance in this sector.

In February 2010, I had the opportunity to visit Pudhuaaru KGFS in Thanjavur. This is a remarkable project which helps us see the interface between households and the financial system in a wholly new light.

The Draft Micro Finance Institutions (Regulations and Development) Bill 2011 (the Bill) seeks to cover all entities engaged in ‘microfinance activities’ under a single regulator (the Reserve Bank of India) and prescribes various rules for such institutions.

Financial inclusion is not a new goal for India and it has always been the stated aim of financial sector policy to seek to include four critical segments: project finance, small and medium enterprises, low-income households and farmers.