The Andhra Pradesh government while promulgating the MFI Ordinance also stated that it has a mandate to disburse INR 100,000 crores bank loans to SHG women members by 2014 to bring 10 million families out of poverty indicating government’s strong belief in serving the needs of the poor through Self Help Group (SHG) model.

NBFCs play a critical role in furthering the goal of financial inclusion. It is our view that in order to make access to financial services universal, while ensuring systemic stability, we need to build on the separate natural strengths of banks and NBFCs.

Following the sessions by Dr. Isher Ahluwalia and Mr. Vikram Kapur, (covered in this post) the workshop participants discussed critical topics such as decentralisation and governance, political economy and institutional fragmentation, revenue generation and infrastructure financing, water and sanitation, capacity building, and land and city growth.

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.