The Future of Finance Initiative

The Future of Finance Initiative housed at Dvara Research aims to identify and address new challenges for policy and regulation in India around customer protection, given the waves of digital innovation currently sweeping financial services.

The Future of Finance Initiative seeks to identify and address new challenges for policy and regulation in India given the waves of digital innovation currently sweeping financial services. Our work in this initiative studies the impacts of digitisation and technological innovation in Indian finance, leading from the consumer perspective on these issues. Our research agenda is focussed on issues that impact particularly lower income individuals as a result of

  • the disintermediation of financial services,
  • the large scale investment in public infrastructure for digital finance and
  • the increased use of consumer data and analytics in finance.

Latest Work


Understanding new-to-UPI users’ experiences with UPI-based digital payment apps

December 16, 2022 | Dvara Research

Beni Chugh & Srikara Prasad


RBI must accommodate fintech innovations, not ban them

May 3, 2022 | Moneycontrol

Deepti George & Beni Chugh


Making digital finance work for women

March 8, 2022 | ET BFSI

Beni Chugh


Comments to the Reserve Bank of India on the Report of the Working Group on Digital Lending including Lending through Online Platforms and Mobile Apps

January 7, 2022 | Dvara Research

Srikara Prasad, Sarah Stanley, Anubhutie Singh, Madhu Srinivas, Shreya R. with inputs from Beni Chugh & Deepti George


A Primer on Competition in the Digital Economy

December 6, 2021 | Dvara Research

Sarah Stanley, Srikara Prasad, and Anubhutie Singh with inputs from Beni Chugh

Team

    

POLICY ANALYST

ADMIN-IN-CHARGE

RESEARCH ASSOCIATE

RESEARCH ASSOCIATE

The Future of Finance
Initiative

The Future of Finance Initiative housed at Dvara Research aims to identify and address new challenges for policy and regulation in India around customer protection, given the waves of digital innovation currently sweeping financial services.

The Future of Finance Initiative seeks to identify and address new challenges for policy and regulation in India given the waves of digital innovation currently sweeping financial services. Our work in this initiative studies the impacts of digitisation and technological innovation in Indian finance, leading from the consumer perspective on these issues. Our research agenda is focussed on issues that impact particularly lower income individuals as a result of (1) the disintermediation of financial services, (2) the large scale investment in public infrastructure for digital finance and (3) the increased use of consumer data and analytics in finance.

Our April 2019 Conference on Regulating Data-Driven Finance unpacked these themes in more depth. Resources and primers detailing this research are available at the conference website here.

Through our research, we seek to ensure that regulation and policy develop in ways that support responsible innovation by existing and new institutions, such that they can deliver comprehensive access to financial services (payments, credit, insurance and investments), while not creating new systemic or customer protection risks in the process. Given the rapidly-changing technology & financial services landscape in India, big questions lie ahead for our efforts to build a vision of inclusive and suitable access to finance in the country:

  • Will Indians change the way they access and use finance?
  • How are firms and regulatory institutions changing the way the evolve in a data-driven world, including in their interactions with individual users?
  • How should policy and regulation respond?
  • How do we protect the most vulnerable customers in face of rapid change and innovation?
  • What are the risks for systemic stability, in this context?

Making UPI payments more customer-centric for new-to-UPI users

This study was conducted through a donation from WhatsApp Pay.
All material created under this study is made available as a public good, accessible through this page
.

Figure 1: Sample characteristics of the Study | Illustration: Centre for Social and Behavioural Change

This survey helped understand
(i) users’ experiences with using DPAs, and
(ii) the effect of demographic variables (Figure 1) and psychological variables (Figure 2) on users’ adoption and usage of DPAs.

Figure 2: Psychological variables tested in the Study