This report presents insights from Catalyst’s survey of fixed-store establishments in Jaipur. It highlights pain points that micromerchants face in digitising their financial and business transactions, and presents strategies to enable digitisation grounded based on human-centred design.
Publications
Enabling Dialogue Between Regulators and Innovators for Financial Inclusion: Seven Use Cases to Test the Waters
This policy note highlights âhigh impactâ use cases for promoting digital payment adoption in India, and offers templates for stakeholders to test them using a sandbox approach and provides recommendations for creating a more enabling regulatory and policy environment.
Testing IVRS as a Tool to Promote Digital Payment Adoption Among Micro and Small Merchants
This field story presents learnings from a study which tested a dedicated Interactive Voice Response System (IVRS) platform to spread awareness about digital payments among small merchants.
Implementing Innovation Through an Ecosystem âLearning And Solving By Doingâ Approach
This learning note captures the adaptive process of innovation in real world settings, based on Catalyst’s experience of undertaking rapid, data-driven, test-learn-and-build cycles to validate innovative business models in the digital payments space.
Using Comic Books to Increase Digital Financial Capabilities in Low-income Clusters
This learning note highlights insights from Catalyst’s initiative to promote digital financial inclusion in a low-income cluster in Jaipur. The intervention included using illustrated comic books to spread awareness and encourage adoption of digital payment solutions among people.
Digitizing Micro-merchant Ecosystems â Low Income Communities
This report presents insights on the financial behaviours and characteristics of low-income households, based on primary research undertaken in Jaipur. Drawing on Catalyst’s research and operational experience, the report recommends potential business models for serving low-income urban clusters sustainably.
Compendium of Reports on Home-based Businesses
This report elaborates on potential pain-points in business operations and the financial context where digital financial service providers and policy-makers at large can innovate to provide the necessary support structures for Home-Based Businesses (HBBs) to improve their financial health.
India Child Well-being Report
This report aims to measure child well-being as a state of being that facilitates i) Healthy Individual Development, ii) Positive Relationships and iii) Protective Contexts. The indices and the scores on child well-being have been computed using a rigorous methodology … Read More
Measuring Open Defecation in India Using Survey Questions: Evidence from a Randomised Survey Experiment
This paper presents findings from a study that investigates differences in reported open defecation between a question about latrine use or open defecation for every household member and a household-level question.
Knowing Whatâs Good for You: Can a Repayment Flexibility Option in Microfinance Contracts Improve Repayment Rates and Business Outcomes?
Flexible microfinance contracts can help borrowers mitigate the negative effects of income fluctuations. But the additional liquidity repayment flexibility entails can increase default. Can this risk be mitigated by using contract price as a screening mechanism? The authors implement a … Read More