Technology will Drive Financial Inclusion
Financial inclusion is fair, timely and adequate access to financial services that include saving, credit, payment and remittance facilities at an affordable cost, and in a transparent manner through institutional agencies. Today, financial inclusion is a vital medium for reaching growth and equitable development to rural India, since access and availability of banking and payment services to the entire population is essential for the creation of an inclusive and efficient economy, and for enabling the Indian growth story to become sustainable and all-encompassing.
For the viewpoint of 21st century urban India, providing these financial service facilities to all Indians may appear to be a simple task, given the reach of urban banking and the benefits of technology. However, the extent of the challenge can be appreciated from the magnitude of financial exclusion in rural India, as out of the more than 600,000 rural habitations, only about 32,000 have a commercial bank branch. Just over 40 per cent of the population across the country has bank accounts, and this ratio is much lower in the north-eastern region
With a population of over one billion people, low levels of financial
literacy, an adult literacy rate of about 67 per cent, poverty and low
income levels, multiplicity of regional languages, difficult terrain in
some regions, this task of providing financial services becomes even
more formidable, as the people being provided the service may first
need to be made aware of their benefits. Thus, a demand needs to be
created for the services, while the target population is gradually
weaned away from its reliance on informal, flexible, easily accessible
and often exploitative sources of credit and remittances..... more
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The way ahead clearly requires the banking technologies to become inter-operable while having the ability to scale up to reach the millions who still await banking facilities, writes R Gopalan
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Agenda for Sustainable Financial Architecture The new decade has begun. One, which for many rises from the ashes of
one of the worst financial crises to hit the world in living memory. At
the beginning of this decade, we begin with hope based on trends and
hopefully with greater clarity in understanding and thought and firmer
support systems for purposive action. The lessons of the meltdown are
still to come in fully and their collation and analysis is just about
beginning. The agenda for the new decade will also involve plugging in
the gaps in regulatory mechanisms and organisational processes. It will
also mean, refining the patterns of action. The emerging times have
something special in them.
Strictly from the Indian point of view, no matter how much we gloat over
containing our losses, the fact is that we know it was more to do with
our ‘unique’ procedures and methods, chance, rather than careful
planning. We also know that some of our major economic policies need
some rethinking and some fine-tuning and we need to revisit some of the
fundamental paradigms of our financial system updating them where
necessary and plugging the gaps where required, thus ushering the new
decade in a more robust manner.
We also need to plan for the times. Changed technologies have woven a
web and we need to create strategies that take a broader view of income
and expenditure. An illustration would help to clarify the point, both
from the sovereign state point of view and the enterprise perspective...more
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Post the worst financial crisis of all times, it is now an era for continuous global dialogue in the way we understand and the way in which we run business. We have to move in a direction of transparency, unison and collective responsibility, writes Vinayshil Gautam, while creating the vision for the decade ahead
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India Shouldn’t Compromise on Growth, Mukherjee Says (Update1)
Oct. 9 (Bloomberg) -- India’s Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee said that the central bank shouldn’t “compromise” on the nation’s economic growth in its efforts to tame inflation. more Promoting ICT in a modern e-finance serviceThe
annual conference and expo “Vietnam Information and Communications
Technology (ICT) in Finance 2009” (ICTF ‘09) opened in Hanoi on
September 23 more
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