Gender Most Critical for Innovation in Finance, DPI: Sherpa Kant and RBIH’s Rajesh Bansal at Making Finance Work for Women 2023

Business Wire India
Gender is the most critical element for Reserve Bank Innovation Hub (RBIH), CEO Rajesh Bansal said offering frictionless access to financial services to every adult woman in India is a national priority. “We have a unique opportunity in India for banks, financial service providers, and fintech firms to offer products to 350 million women. It makes business sense largely because the cost of services of those products has lowered by up to 70 percent,” he said at the ‘Making Finance Work for Women’ summit in Mumbai.
 
The summit was hosted by Women’s World Banking, a nonprofit organization that designs women-centric commercially-viable solutions for financial service providers and fintech companies. It was attended by more than 300 delegates from over 30 countries.
 
India’s G20 Sherpa and former NITI Aayog chief Amitabh Kant made the closing remarks at the summit saying that the Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI) needs to have a gender lens. He said that to make DPI work for women, national IDs, universal banking, and digital payments infrastructure were key.
 
“One issue that does not often get identified is what DPI means for women and how it can benefit them. I want to emphasize the need to have a gender lens to it,” he said. He highlighted the urgency to design solutions and policy reforms to keep women at the center and ride on existing DPI rails.
 
At a panel discussion, Mr. Bansal said that gender-disaggregated data is key to enabling policymakers to understand how catastrophic events, such as a pandemic, impact women and their dependents. “Setting up a data observatory is a key pillar for women’s financial inclusion. We are working with banks and other providers to understand how women save, pay, or receive credit. This critical information will then help us devise and implement solutions, regulations, and policies,” Mr. Bansal said.
 
Kalpana Ajayan, Regional Head-South Asia, of the organization said, “Data is critical for any organization to locate, contextualize, and gauge the size of a problem. A gender-disaggregated approach to collecting data, then, becomes the guiding principle to solve problems about women’s financial inclusion.”
 
RBIH is working on a gender strategy to promote the access and usage of banking and financial services among women. Women’s World Banking is a member of their Gender Expert Committee, part of RBIH’s gender strategy.
 
The panel Mr. Bansal was speaking at also deliberated that an electronic data warehouse, which is supply-driven, is a critical first step to automating and updating such data daily. Having an analytical team in the gathering of such disaggregated data is imperative, they highlighted.
 
Talking briefly about India’s DPI, he added, “We are innovating to build the world’s best DPI. For this, we are leveraging India’s Digital Stack and looking at niche sectors, such as dairy, where we can unlock credit opportunities for women entrepreneurs.”

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