Topics Covered:
Indian Economy and issues relating to planning, mobilization of resources, growth, development and employment.
Inter-ministerial panel on fintech
What to study?
For Prelims and mains: Key recommendations, significance and challenges present.
Context: An inter-ministerial panel on fintech has submitted its report to Finance Minister.
Key recommendations:
- Put in place a comprehensive legal framework to protect consumers of digital services.
- Reserve Bank of India should examine issuance of ‘virtual banking licences’.
- Dematerialisation of fixed deposits, sovereign gold bonds and post office certificates to promote easy transactions and collateral.
- RBI should mandate banks to share crucial customer data after consent.
- Regulation technology (or RegTech) should be adopted by all financial sector regulators to develop standards and facilitate adoption by financial service providers.
- Fintech should be used to improve access of financial products for MSMEs, farmers and poorer sections of the society.
- Insurance companies and lending agencies should be encouraged to use drone and remote sensing technology for crop area, damage and location assessments to support risk reduction in insurance/lending business.
- Digitise land records across the country on a war footing.
- Set up of an Inter-Ministerial Steering Committee on fintech Applications in the Department of Economic Affairs (DEA) to monitor progress, including exploring and suggesting the potential applications in government financial processes and applications.
Sources: the Hindu.
