THE SIGNIFICANCE OF FINANCIAL LITERACY FOR CONSUMER PROTECTION: A STUDY OF BANK CUSTOMERS IN DAKSHINA KANNADA DISTRICT

Abstract

Awareness of available financial services from formal financial institutions is essential. Creating awareness for customers on products and services of financial institutions is called financial literacy. The term financial literacy was used when the financial inclusion concept emerged in the year 2005. Even though having a good number of banks and banking institutions, most of the people in India were excluded from formal financial services because of a lack of awareness and financial literacy. They depend upon money lenders where they get money when they needed and not had more formalities to access their monetary needs. People need to be given knowledge of formal banking facilities and brought them into formal banking penetration (Dsouza S. 2017). Financial literacy is not only creating awareness on available banking services, it also creates awareness of consumer rights and responsibilities. This paper is to study……… This paper analyses financial literacy among consumers and also examine the impact of financial literacy on consumer protection. A random sample of 106 customers was chosen as the respondents for the study. A self-administered questionnaire was used for the collection of primary data and distributed to the random samples. The result shows that most of the respondents are unaware of the grievance redressal system exists for banking customers. The study also explains the problems faced by consumers, awareness level on consumer rights, and available banking services. KEYWORDS: Financial Literacy, Banking Products and Services, Consumer Rights and Protection