Mumbai: Nachiket Mor, president of the ICICI Foundation for Inclusive Growth, an arm of ICICI Bank Ltd, India’s largest private sector bank, is giving shape to its CEO and managing director K.V. Kamath’s idea of increasing the incomes of low-income households in a sustainable manner.
The foundation, set up in January, has so far tied up with five non-profit organizations: the Institute for Financial Management and Research (IFMR) Trust, ICICI Centre for Child Health and Nutrition, Centre for Elementary Education, Corporate Social Organisations Partners and Environmental Sustainable Project Finance.
On a mission: Mor says there is no way to provide services to a very large portion of the population, without knowing the numbers involved. (Photo: Abhijit Bhatlekar/Mint)
In an interview with
Mint, Mor spoke on the foundation’s activities and its plans. Edited excerpts:
What is the biggest challenge before you?
The biggest challenge is that there’s simply no way to provide financial services to a very large portion of the population. No one knows the exact number of people who are not served, but everybody agrees it’s in the neighbourhood of 300 million people. There is no point in arriving at a number because it’s so large that no matter what you do, there will still remain lots to be done.
One of our partners, the IFMR Trust in Chennai, is interested in financial inclusion. We are working with them closely to try and understand what needs to be done and how we can address each piece of the problem.
For instance, how do you originate financial transactions and contact the customers? How do you serve on a day-to-day basis? This is the core problem of every service, and finance is no different. How do we make sure that small businesses are able to get the finance that they need? How do the migrants get finance when they are moving? Traditional models may not work to address these issues.
We must solve the problem of migrants as urbanization is going to accelerate. Look at the total population living within cities of India and more than this number will migrate from the countryside to urban India over the next 20-30 years. We have to come up with better ideas to serve them.
Since the traditional approach will not work, how are you addressing this?
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What is needed is what the government and the Reserve Bank of India tried to do with the local area banks and the regional rural bank model. The core idea was to build specialized region-specific institutions to serve the regions with a full suite of products. However, it did not work. By using better technology, better approaches towards managing personnel and more modern financial products which were not available even five years ago, we can be do a better job.
Have you introduced any new financial product?