New Public Data Set and Tool for Improving Financial Health in India Launched

New Delhi, February 17, 2019: The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, leading impact-driven advisory firm, Dalberg, and The Centre for Social and Behaviour Change at Ashoka University have launched a public data set and tool to enable better design for financial health in India. It is unique in using a multi-method research approach including human-centered design, cognitive psychology, behavioral science, and large-scale survey-based methods together to understand consumers.

Titled Aspiring Indians, this is the India chapter of The Human Account, a robust, holistic resource with data and insights covering six countries in Asia and Africa. Using a nationally representative sample, Aspiring Indians surveyed 3,300 respondents in 16 states to come up with critical insights, six key consumer segments and further developed six prototype financial products that meet the needs of the consumers of each segment.

Delivering the opening keynote at the launch event, Dr. Amitabh Kant, CEO, NITI Aayog, said: “We need to get providers and consumers to speak to common aspirations. We know broadly what providers’ priorities are. But it is critical that these priorities match with what low-income consumers want.”

This study suggests that financial services need to be better designed and we need to do so by deeply understanding the needs of the financially underserved. There is also a need for more collaborations to improve the future of segmentation and financial health.

Dr. Pawan Bakhshi, who leads the Financial Services program at the Gates Foundation said, “This research is a robust and holistic information resource and an action-oriented tool created to enable better design of products and policies to help people live a healthier financial life.”

Financial services providers can use Aspiring Indians to identify which consumers might be suitable for an insurance or credit product, which ones are likely to be long time savers, or early adopters of digital technologies.

Aspiring Indians was launched on 11th February 2019, at ‘Decoding Consumer Behaviour to Drive Financial Health’, an invitation-only event attended by executives from financial services, the public sector and the media.

Corporate Comm India(CCI Newswire)