According to the passage, for which of the following reasons is the viability of financial inclusion under question? ?->(Show Answer!)

1. According to the passage, for which of the following reasons is the viability of financial inclusion under question?

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MCQ-> Read the following passage carefully and answer the questions based on it. Some words have been printed in bold to help you locate them while answering some of the questions.Notwithstanding the fact that the share of household savings to GDS is showing decline, still this segment is the significant contributor to GDS with 70% share. Indian households are among the most frugal in the world However, commensurate capital formation has not been taking place as a lion's share of household savings are being parked in physical assets compared to financial assets. The pattern of disposition of saving is an important factor in determining how the saved amount is utilized for productive purposes. The proportion of household saving in financial assets determines the channelisation of saving for investment in other sectors of the economy. However, the volume of investment of saving in physical assets determines the productivity and generation of income in that sector itself. Post-Independence era has witnessed a significant shift in deployment of household savings especially the share of financial assets increased from 26.39% in 1950 to 54.05% in 1990 may be on account of increased bank branch network across the country coupled with improved awareness of investors on various financial / banking products. However, contrast to common expectations, the share of financial assets in total household savings has come down from 54.05% to 50.21% especially in post reform period i.e. 1990 to 2010 despite providing easy access and availability of banking facilities compared to earlier years. The increased share of physical assets over financial assets (around 4%) during the last two decades is a cause of concern requires focused attention to arrest the trend. Traditionally, the Indians are risk-averse and prefer to invest surplus funds in physical assets such as Gold, Silver and lands. Nevertheless, considerable share of savings also owing to financial assets, which includes, Currency, Bank Deposits, Claims on Government, Contractual Savings, Equities The composition of household financial savings shows that the bank deposits (44%) continue to remain the major contributor along with the rise in the Contractual Savings, Claims on Government and Currency. Though there was gradual decline in currency holdings by the households i.e. 13.79% in 1970s to 9.30% in 2007, still the present currency holding level with households appears to be on high side compared to other countries. The primary reasons for higher currency holdings could be absence of banking facilities in majority villages (5.70 lakh villages)as well as hoarding of unaccounted money in the form of cash to circumvent tax laws. Though, cash is treated as financial asset, in reality, a major portion of currency is blocked and become unproductive. Bank deposits seemed to be the preferred choice mainly on account of its inbuilt features such as Safety, Security and Liquidity. Traditionally, the Household sector has been playing a leading role in the landscape of bank deposits followed by the Government sector. However, the last two decades has witnessed significant shift in ownership of Bank deposits. While there was improvement in Corporate and Government sectors' share by 8.30% and 7.20% respectively during the period 1999 to 2009, household sector lost a share of 13.30% in the post reform period. In the post independence era, Indian financial system was characterized by poor infrastructure and low level of financial deepening. Savings in physical assets constituted the largest portion of the savings compared to the financial assets in the initial years of the planning periods. While rural households were keen on acquiring farm assets, the portfolio of urban households constituted consumer durables, gold, jewellery and house property.Despite the fact that the household savings have been gradually moving from physical assets to financial assets over the years, still 49.79% of household savings are wrapped in unproductive physical assets, which is a cause of concern as the share of physical assets to total savings are very high in the recent years compared to emerging economies. This trend needs to be arrested as scarce funds are being diverted into unproductive segments. Of course, investment in Real estate sector can be treated as productive provided construction activity is commenced within reasonable time, but it is regrettably note that many investors just buy and hold it for speculation leading to unproductive investments. India has probably the largest fascination with gold than any other country in the world with a share of 9.50% of the world's total gold holdings. The World Gold Council believes that they are over 18000 tonnes of gold holding in the country. More impressive is the fact that current demand from India alone consumes 25% of the world's annual gold output. Large amount of capital is blocked in gold which resides in bank lockers and remain unproductive. Indian economy would grow faster if the capital markets could attract more of the nation's savings and channel them into more productive areas, especially infrastructure. If the Indian market can develop and evolve into a more mature financial system, which persuades the middle class to put more of its money into equities, the potential is mind-boggling.Which of the following statement (s) is/are correct in the context of the given passage? I. The GDS percentage to GDP has shown considerable improvement from 10% in 1950 to 33.7% in 2010, which is one of the highest globally. II. The saving rate however shows an increasing trend, marginal decline is observed under tic use hold sector. III. The share of financial assets in total household savings have come down from 54.05% to 21% especially in post reform era.....

MCQ-> Directions: Read the following passage carefully and answer the questions given below it. Certain words have been printed in bold to help you locate them while answering some of the questions.Financial Inclusion (FI) is an emerging priority for banks that have nowhere else to go to achieve business growth. The viability of FI Business is under Question, because while banks and their delivery partners continue to make investments, they haven't seen commensurate returns. In markets like India, most programmes are focussed on customer onboarding, an expensive process which people often find difficult to afford, involving issuance of smart cards to the customers. However, large-scale customer acquisition hasn't translated into large-scale business, with many accounts lying dormant and therefore yielding no return on the bank's investment. For the same reason, Business Correspondent Agents, who constitute the primary channel for financial inclusion, are unable to pursue their activity as a full-time job. One major reason for this state of events is that the customer onboarding process is often delayed after the submission of documents (required to validate the details of the concerned applicant) by the applicant and might take as long as two weeks. By this time initial enthusiasm of applicants fades away. Moreover, the delivery partners don't have the knowledge and skill to propose anything other than the most basic financial products to the customer and hence do not serve their banks' goal to expanding the offering in unbanked markets.Contrary to popular perception, the inclusion segment is not a singular impoverished, undifferentiated mass and it is important to navigate its diversity to identify the right target customers for various programmes. Rural markets do have their share of rich people who do not use banking services simply because they are inconvenient to access or have low perceived value. At the same time, urban markets, despite a high branch density, have a multitude of low wage earners outside the financial net. Moreover, the branch timings of banks rarely coincide with the off-work hours of the labour class.Creating affordability is crucial in tapping the unbanked market. No doubt pricing is a tool, but banks also need to be innovative in right-sizing their proposition to convince customers that they can derive big value even from small amounts. One way of doing this is to show the target audience that a bank account is actually a lifestyle enabler, a convenient and safe means to send money to family or make a variety of purchases. Once banks succeed in hooking customers with this value proposition they must sustain their interest by introducing a simple and intuitive user application, ubiquitous access over mobile and other touch points, and adopting a banking mechanism which is not only secure but also reassuring to the customer. Technology is the most important element of financial inclusion strategy and an enabler of all others. The choice of technology is, therefore, a crucial decision, which could make or mar the agenda. Of the various selection criteria, cost is perhaps the most important. This certainly does not mean buying the cheapest package, but rather choosing that solution which by scaling transactions to huge volumes reduces per unit operating cost. An optimal mix of these strategies would no doubt offer an innovative means of expansion in the unbanked market.Which of the following facts is true as per the passage?
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MCQ-> Read the following passage carefully and answer the questions given below it. Certain words have been printed in bold to help you to locate them while answering some of the questions.Financial Inclusion (FI) is an emerging priority for banks that have nowhere else to go to achieve business growth. The variable of FI business is under question, because while banks and their delivery partners continue to make investments, they haven’t seen commensurate returns. In markets like India, most programs are focused on customer on-boarding, an expensive process which people often find difficult to afford involving issuance of smart cards to the customers. However, large scale customer acquisition hasn’t translated into large scale business, with many accounts lying dormant and therefore yielding no return on the bank’s investment. For the same reason, Business Correspondent Agents who constitute the primary channel for financial inclusion are able to pursue their activity as a full-time job. One major reason for this state of events is that the customer on-boarding process is often delayed after the submission of documents (required to validate the details of concerned applicant) by the applicant and might take as long as two weeks. By this time the initiation enthusiasm of applicant fades away. Moreover, the delivery partners don’t have the knowledge and skills to propose anything other than the most basic financial products to the customer and hence do not serve their bank’s goal of expanding the offering in unbanked markets. Contrary to popular perception, the inclusion segment is not a singular impoverished, undifferentiated mass and it is important to navigate its diversity to identify the right target customers for various programs.Rural markets do have their share of rich people who do not use banking servicessimpiy because they are inconvenient to access or have low perceived value. At the same time, urban markets, despite a high branch density, have multitude of low wage earners outside the financial net. Moreover, the branch timings of banks rarely coincide with the off-work hours labor class. Creating affordability is circular in tapping the unbanked market. No doubt pricing is a tool, but banks also need to be innovative in right-sizing their proposition to convince customers that they can derive big value even from small amounts. One way of doing this is to show the target audience that a bank account is actually a lifestyle enabler, a convenient and safe means to send money to family or make a variety of purchases. Once banks succeed in hooking customers with this value proposition they must sustain their interest by introducing a simple and intuitive user application, ubiquitous access over mobile and other touch points, and adopting a banking mechanism which is not only secure but also reassuring to the customer. Technology is the most important element of financial inclusion strategy and an enabler of all others.The choice of technology is therefore a crucial decision, which could make or mar the agenda. Of the various selection criteria, cost is perhaps the most important. This certainly does not mean buying the cheapest package, but rather choosing that solution which by scaling transactions to huge volumes reduces per unit operating cost. An optimal mix of these strategies would no doubt offer an innovative means of expansion in the unbanked market.Which of the following fact is ‘’true’’ as per the passage?
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MCQ-> Read the following passage carefully and answer the questions given below it. Certain words are printed in bold to help you to locate them while answering some of the questions.A large majority of the poor in India are outside the formal banking system. The policy of financial inclusion sets out to remedy this by making available a basic banking ‘no frills’ account either with nil or very minimum balances as well as charges that would make such accounts accessible to vast sections of the population. However, the mere opening of a bank account in the name of every household or adult person may not be enough, unless these accounts and financial services offered to them are used by the account holders. At present, commercial banks do not find it viable to provide services to the poor especially in the rural areas because of huge transaction costs, low volumes of savings in the accounts, lack of information on the account holder, etc. For the poor. interacting with the banks with their paper work, economic costs of going to the bank and the need for flexibility in their accounts, make them turn to other informal channels or other institutions. Thus, there are constraints on both the supply and the demand side.Till now, banks were looking at these accounts from a purely credit perspective. Instead, they should look at this from the point of view of meeting the huge need of the poor for savings. Poor households want to save and, contrary to the common perception, do have the funds to save, but lack control. Informal mutual saving systems like the Rotating Savings and Credit Associations (ROSCAs), widespread in Africa, and ‘thrift and credit groups’ in India demonstrate that poor households save. For the poor household, which lack access to the formal insurance system and the credit system, savings provide a safety net and help them tide over crises. Savings can also keep them away from the clutches of moneylenders, make formal institutions more favourable to lending to them, encourage investment and make them shift to more productive activities, as they may invest in slightly more risky activities which have an overall higher rate of return.Research shows the efficacy of informal institutions in increasing the savings of the small account holders. An MFI in the Philippines, which had existing account holders, was studied. They offered new products with ‘commitment features’. One type had withdrawal restrictions in the sense that it required individuals to restrict their right to withdraw any funds from their own accounts until they reached a self-specified and documented goal. The other type was deposit options. Clients could purchase a locked box for a small fee. The key was with the bank and the client has to bring the box to the bank to make the deposit. He could not dip into the savings even if he wanted to. These accounts did not pay extra money and were illiquid. Surprisingly, these products were popular even though these had restrictions. Results showed that those who opted for these accounts with restrictions had substantially greater savings rates than those who did not. The policy of financial inclusion can be a success if financial inclusion focuses onboth saving needs and credit needs, having a diversified product portfolio for the poor but recognising that self-control problems need to be addressed by having commitment devices. The products with commitment features should be optional. Furthermore transaction costs for the poor could be cut down, by making innovative use of technology available and offering mobile vans with ATM and deposit collection features which could visit villages periodically.What is the aim of the financial inclusion policy ?
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MCQ-> Read the following passage carefully and answer the questions given below it. Certain words/phrases have been printed in bold to help you locate them while answering some of the questions. The past quarter of a century has seen several bursts of selling by the world’s governments, mostly but not always in benign market conditions. Those in the OECD, a rich-country club, divested plenty of stuff in the 20 years before the global financial crisis. The first privatisation wave, which built up from the mid-1980s and peaked in 2000, was largely European. The drive to cut state intervention under Margaret Thatcher in Britain soon spread to the continent. The movement gathered pace after 1991, when eastern Europe put thousands of rusting state-owned enterprises (SOEs) on the block. A second wave came in the mid-2000s, as European economies sought to cash in on buoyant markets. But activity in OECD countries slowed sharply as the financial crisis began. In fact, it reversed. Bailouts of failing banks and companies have contributed to a dramatic increase in government purchases of corporate equity during the past five years. A more lasting fea ture is the expansion of the state capitalism practised by China and other emerging economic powers. Governments have actually bought more equity than they have sold in most years since 2007, though sales far exceeded purchases in 2013. Today privatisation is once again “alive and well”, says William Megginson of the Michael Price College of Business at the University of Oklahoma. According to a global tally he recently completed, 2012 was the third-best year ever, and preliminary evidence suggests that 2013 may have been better. However, the geography of sell-offs has changed, with emerging markets now to the fore. China, for instance, has been selling minority stakes in banking, energy, engineering and broadcasting; Brazil is selling airports to help finance a $20 billion investment programme. Eleven of the 20 largest IPOs between 2005 and 2013 were sales of minority stakes by SOEs, mostly in developing countries. By contrast, state-owned assets are now “the forgotten side of the balance-sheet” in many advanced economies, says Dag Detter, managing partner of Whetstone Solutions, an adviser to governments on asset restructuring. They shouldn’t be. Governments of OECD countries still oversee vast piles of assets, from banks and utilities to buildings, land and the riches beneath (see table). Selling some of these holdings could work wonders: reduce debt, finance infrastructure, boost economic efficiency. But governments often barely grasp the value locked up in them. The picture is clearest for companies or company-like entities held by central governments. According to data compiled by the OECD and published on its website, its 34 member countries had 2,111 fully or majority-owned SOEs, with 5.9m employees, at the end of 2012. Their combined value (allowing for some but not all pension-fund liabilities) is estimated at $2.2 trillion, roughly the same size as the global hedge-fund industry. Most are in network industries such as telecoms, electricity and transport. In addition, many countries have large minority stakes in listed firms. Those in which they hold a stake of between 10% and 50% have a combined market value of $890 billion and employ 2.9m people. The data are far from perfect. The quality of reporting varies widely, as do definitions of what counts as a state-owned company: most include only centralgovernment holdings. If all assets held at sub-national level, such as local water companies, were included, the total value could be more than $4 trillion. Reckons Hans Christiansen, an OECD economist. Moreover, his team has had to extrapolate because some QECD members, including America and Japan, provide patchy data. America is apparently so queasy about discussions of public ownership of -commercial assets that the Treasury takes no part in the OECD’s working group on the issue, even though it has vast holdings, from Amtrak and the 520,000-employee Postal Service to power generators and airports. The club’s efforts to calculate the value that SOEs add to, or subtract from, economies were abandoned after several countries, including America, refused to co-operate. Privatisation has begun picking up again recently in the OECD for a variety of reasons. Britain’s Conservative-led coalition is fbcused on (some would say obsessed with) reducing the public debt-to-GDP ratio. Having recently sold the Royal Mail through a public offering, it is hoping to offload other assets, including its stake in URENCO, a uranium enricher, and its student-loan portfolio. From January 8th, under a new Treasury scheme, members of the public and businesses will be allowed to buy government land and buildings on the open market. A website will shortly be set up to help potential buyers see which bits of the government’s /..337 billion-worth of holdings ($527 billion at today’s rate, accounting for 40% of developable sites round Britain) might be surplus. The government, said the chief treasury secretary, Danny Alexander, “should not act as some kind of compulsive hoarder”. Japan has different reasons to revive sell-offs, such as to finance reconstruction after its devastating earthquake and tsunami in 2011. Eyes are once again turning to Japan Post, a giant postal-to-financial-services conglomerate whose oftpostponed partial sale could at last happen in 2015 and raise (Yen) 4 trillion ($40 billion) or more. Australia wants to sell financial, postal and aviation assets to offset the fall in revenues caused by the commodities slowdown. In almost all the countries of Europe, privatisation is likely “to surprise on the upside” as long as markets continue to mend, reckons Mr Megginson. Mr Christiansen expects to see three main areas of activity in coming years. First will be the resumption of partial sell-offs in industries such as telecoms, transport and utilities. Many residual stakes in partly privatised firms could be sold down further. France, for instance, still has hefty stakes in GDF SUEZ, Renault, Thales and Orange. The government of Francois Hollande may be ideologically opposed to privatisation, but it is hoping to reduce industrial stakes to raise funds for livelier sectors, such as broadband and health. The second area of growth should be in eastern Europe, where hundreds of large firms, including manufacturers, remain in state hands. Poland will sell down its stakes in listed firms to make up for an expected reduction in EU structural funds. And the third area is the reprivatisation of financial institutions rescued during the crisis. This process is under way: the largest privatisation in 2012 was the $18 billion offering of America’s residual stake in AIG, an insurance company.Which of the following statements is not true in the context of the given passage ?
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