event
Carnegie India

Digital Payments and Financial Inclusion

Thu. August 27th, 2020
Zoom Webinar

 

Over the last few years, India has made several efforts at improving access to finance and laying out the rails for the digital payment ecosystem. While this has smoothened financial flows for low-income clients, challenges of trust, interoperability, suitable credit products, gender imbalance and pricing remain. How can the financial inclusion and payments industry in India address the issues of trust, pricing, merchant acquiring issues and cybersecurity? How can India reduce the ratio of cash in circulation to GDP (India’s is one of the highest in the world)? Further, what can India learn from similar efforts in other countries?

In this KnowledgeTransfer@CarnegieIndia workshop, Chetna Gala Sinha and Ragavan Venkatesan introduced the status of digital financial inclusion in India, the problems it faces, and possible solutions for enabling access to formal financial services for the next half billion. The discussion was moderated by Rajesh Bansal.

TechnologySouth AsiaIndia
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event speakers

Chetna Sinha

Chetna Sinha is the founder and chairperson of the Mann Deshi Mahila Bank and the Mann Deshi Foundation. Mann Deshi runs business schools, a community radio, and a Chambers of Commerce for rural women micro-entrepreneurs. It has supported half a million women to date. Ms. Sinha has been awarded the Nari Shakti Puraskar, India's highest civilian award for women who work in the area of women's empowerment. She has served as a co-chair of the World Economic Forum in Davos (2018), Switzerland, and as a co-chair of Financial Inclusion at the W20 Summit (2018) in Argentina.

Ragavan Venkatesan

Ragavan Venkatesan is the founder and CEO of DGV, NeoBanking for Bharat. He was one of the founding members of IDFC Bank and has also formerly worked at the NPCI. At the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI), Mr. Venkatesan was handpicked to lead the Financial Inclusion and Government Payments vertical, and co-create the world’s first and largest interoperable biometric payment platform (AEPS & APBS), powering the Government of India, the Direct Benefit Transfer (DBT) platform, and the UIDAI core team.

Rajesh Bansal

Senior Adviser, Carnegie India

Rajesh Bansal was a senior adviser at Carnegie India. His research focuses on financial technologies, particularly electronic payment systems, electronic cash transfers, and digital financial services to enable inclusive development. He leads the center’s technology and society program.