Whose financial grievances go unobserved?

Abstract

Financial inclusion around the world is developing rapidly and reaching 76% of the world’s population. However, the gap between access to formal financial products and the long-term use of them remains. We present the results of a first representative telephone survey in India, which explores a major friction that creates this gap: Redressing consumer complaints. Consumer complaints behaviour is product-invariant. Conditional on a grievance, vulnerable consumer groups such as the poor and low-educated are significantly less likely to complain owing to lack of procedural knowledge and belief that resolution is unlikely. They go unobserved in the official data. At the minimum, policy steps to address this friction will require a large-scale overhaul of the current grievance redress framework to be consumer-focused and stop assuming consumers have the education, means and faith to resolve their complaints.