Financial Inclusion - News And Views - April 2017

 
 

India’s failed experiment to bring gender parity through a women’s bank ended on March 31st; the three-year-old Bharatiya Mahila Bank was merged with State Bank of India. If women’s access and usage of banking is to increase, rather than a separate bank, we need significant change within all banks – more sensitive KYC requirements, more women agents etc. Yet, the first step to recognising the problem is in measuring it and in India, we have not even got as far as collecting gender disaggregated data – a task that the RBI has yet to commit to. Read the guidance note by the Alliance for Financial Inclusion (AFI) for examples of national strategies that work, Integrating Gender and Women’s Financial Inclusion into National Strategies .

Payments Banks are set to take off this year in India, making for a totally different banking sector. These fledging banks will have to be nimble to face the competition; regular banks are disrupting the payments business – read how Kotak Mahindra Bank’s disruptive 811 may spell trouble for payments banks .

A detailed user interface design guide is now available for payment apps, based on a comparative review of the Airtel Money, BHIM, Buddy, Jana Cash, PayTM, and Pockets apps ( See Anand Raman and Leena Datwani, CGAP, March 2017) . This will be extremely useful for all digital financial services. However, NPCI and RBI should release more detailed analytics of the transaction volumes under each player, to help highlight the laggards, and hence the issues to address, in payments solutions.

With a plethora of new digital payment modes now (UPI, Bharat QR, Bhim etc.), the massive policy push towards a less-cash economy will succeed with a) reliable connectivity across the country and b) a focus on consumer protection. Read Nandan Nilekani’s take: Seminal year for move towards cashless payments.


RBI advisory on E-wallets
FinTechs and Virtual Currency: Shri R. Gandhi, Deputy Governor, RBI, March 1, 2017

 
 
 
 
 

Pradhan Mantri Jan - Dhan Yojana
ATM Progress for the quarter ending December, 2016
Trend of Zero Balance Accounts under PMJDY
Position of Overdraft
Position of Bank Mitra Infrastructure
Monthly Report sent to PMO for the month of January, 2017 on DBT
• MGNREGS Annual Master Circular- FY 2017-18
SoP for expediting aadhaar based payments- MIS provisions


INDIA

PMJDY: SBI spent 774 crores for maintaining Jan Dhan accounts
One crore Jan Dhan A/Cs frozen last year
Financial Inclusion Is A Prerequisite For Gender Inclusion
Aditya Birla Group gets RBI licence to start payments bank
26 companies want to collaborate with India Post Payments Bank
Chittoor to have 1st India Post Payment Bank soon
NSDL to float payments bank by May
Fino Paytech receives final approval from RBI for payments bank
Paytm hopes to start payments bank by month-end
RBI's draft norms likely to make biz expensive: Paytm
Indian digital wallet firms choke on RBI's tough new guidelines
RGVN Microfinance receives final licence from RBI for small finance bank
Over 1 lakh SB accounts opened in TN: Airtel Payments Bank
India's 1st Aadhaar Pay Based Biometric Payment System

 

INTERNATIONAL

Do Peer-to-Peer Lenders Understand Risk?
Market Facilitation Is the Way Ahead, But It Needs to Do More
Is the Unbundling of Payments from Banking Regulation Imminent?
Wari to Buy Tigo in Senegal: Opportunity for Financial Inclusion?
The Face of Financial Inclusion in 2025: The Experts’ View
To the Future and Back: Financial Inclusion in the Arab World
How Social Norms Affect Women’s Financial Inclusion
5 Keys to Addressing the Needs of API Consumers
Driving adoption of Digital Identity for Sustainable Development: An End-user Perspective
Opportunities for digitising value chain payments: Our findings from Malawi


Where credit is due - customer experience of
digital credit in Kenya
: MicroSave, March 22, 2017
Development Finance Institutions and Financial Inclusion , CGAP, March 17, 2017
Demonetisation and Digitisation - A Diagnostic Study , MicroSave, March 8, 2017
Financial Inclusion Measurement in the Arab World , CGAP, March 3, 2017

New rules proposed for PPIs
Payments Banks Update
Financial Inclusion in India: Going beyond SCBs
Payments banks in uncharted territory
- Mint, 29 November 2016

 
 
 

Editor:sumita@indicus.org The Indicus Centre for Financial Inclusion was launched in 2011 to distil and disseminate information on accelerating the poor’s access to high-quality financial services. ©Indicus Centre for Financial Inclusion. All rights reserved. 4thApril 2017
 

Newsletters from July 2020 are available at https://icfi.substack.com/

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