India’s failed experiment to bring gender parity through a women’s bank ended on March 31^st; 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.

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