Everything you need to know about the Bharat Inclusion Summit

Technology-driven entrepreneurship in India has primarily focused on catering to the affluent segment of the country, leaving the majority of the population – both urban and rural – underserved. The reason is primarily due to the difficulties in delivering services to a large user base with low purchasing power.

The recent past has witnessed technology significantly reducing the cost and time to scale digital services. Despite this, over half a billion Indians remain underserved by the existing solutions.

In 2018, CIIE.CO set up the Bharat Inclusion Initiative (BII) as a full stack solution to address the hard problem of economic exclusion in India. Supported by Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, JP Morgan, MetLife Foundation, Michael & Susan Dell Foundation and Omidyar Network, BII has five key work domains – evangelizing inclusive fintech solutions, incubating new innovations, accelerating promising inclusive fintech startups, investing seed capital to unlock effect on a large scale, and research that encapsulates the entire journey from customer to effect.

In the course of five years, BII has accelerated over 54 inclusive fintechs, invested in seven ready-to-scale startups, incubated four promising ideas, supported 24 research studies and catalyzed groundbreaking research on rural households. The program has also been a partner in several national initiatives in the areas of payment for feature phones, fintech for women, etc. Startups supported by the program have served more than 32 million customers and raised over 150 million in funding.

Scheduled for March 3, 2023 in Bengaluru, The Bharat Inclusion Summit is designed as a platform to reflect on the lessons learned and consider the way forward for inclusive fintech in India. These discussions will take three forms – carefully curated panel discussions, forward-thinking fireside chats and intensive product design workshops. In addition to an amazing speaker line-up, the summit will also create intentional spaces for networking and collaboration that can sprout among players in the inclusive fintech ecosystem.

What to expect?

The Bharat Inclusion Summit boasts a host of stalwarts participating in panel discussions and fireside chats. The list includes Nandan Nilekanico-founder and chairman, Infosys; Nithin KamathFounder and CEO, Zerodha; Ajay Kumar Choudhury, Managing Director, RBI; Suseela ChintalaManaging Director, NABARD; Sairee ChahalFounder, SHEROES; Dilip AsbeManaging Director and CEO, NPCI; Vipul Sekhsaria, co-founder and Chief Networks Officer, Kaleidofin; and several other notable names from the industry.

The summit will begin with a fireside chat ‘Customer protection: Building a responsible digital payment ecosystem‘which highlights a necessary trade-off between ease of user flow and customer protection, and will also feature fireside chats on a range of topics such as CBDC and the Future of Finance in India, Next Frontiers of Financial Inclusion and Scaling Zerodha: Lessons on Building for Bharat.

The panels will have a strong focus on the customer, with topics such as ‘Moving from gender neutral to gender oriented – how can fintech start to better serve women?‘, ‘How can technology contribute to scaling up access to credit and insurance for small farmers?‘ highlight fintech’s role in filling gaps in financial services for women and small farmers, and ‘Micro merchants: bridging the capital labor gap‘ focus on the essentials to be handled while meeting small credit/working capital needs of the micro retailers. There will be several panels exploring the role of enablers in scaling inclusive fintechs and forward-thinking panels such as the role of climate finance in building resilience for Bharat.

Finally, the summit will also include workshops on ‘Building digital pathways for inclusive Fintech products‘ to discuss how the user experience should be designed when building interfaces for the lower income segments, and ‘How should fintechs design products that are intuitive for female customer segments?‘

Before the summit is called a day, it ends with a networking evening and collaboration with talented people from the industry.

So, what’s the wait? REGISTER NOW for an invitation, and to know more about the agenda.