Fin inclusion plan big opportunity for banks: BCG

Boston Consultancy Group (BCG), along with top industry body CII, has come out with a 15-point agenda on how to convert a Rs 20,000-crore obligation into a real opportunity for banks to realise the government's ambitious financial inclusion programme.

The consultancy firm, in a report titled 'Obligation to Opportunity', said though India is emerging as a major economic force, growth in not broad-based as a majority of the population is excluded from the financial services sector and this needs to be addressed.

"India's chances of being a major economic power will be severely jeopardised if growth is not broad-based. We have to include each and every person in the financial sector," BCG Chairman (Asia-Pacific) Janmanjaye Sinha told reporters while releasing the report here today.

According to the report, about half of the Indian households do not have access to products like remittances, savings and credit.

However, it pointed out that there has been an improvement in the current levels of financial inclusion at 47%, from about 35% five years ago.

BCG's agenda, that would help market participants as well as policy-makers to ensure financial inclusion, includes the need to bring down human resource costs per employee, learning to make low-cost distribution partnerships, Aadhar (brand name for unique identification numbers) as a platform and disbursal of the government payments using Aadhar-linked bank accounts, among others.