An average person needs between 10 and 15 financial products to manage the complexity of contemporary life. A few decades ago, when the government was the main employer and would guarantee returns, it was easy to just leave it to the government to fix your life if you were lucky enough to be in the network. Those outside just got by with their own savings in gold, real estate and bank deposits. Opening up the markets boosts both incomes and choices. It pours millions of people into the middle class that consumes not just pizzas and gyms, but also financial products. But given the complexity of the market, even willing on-boarders to formal finance find it difficult to choose. One way to solve this is to have generics in the financial sector. Just as generics cost much lower as compared to branded pharma, we can think of generics that do the basic function without the bells and whistles. What a Jan-Dhan Yojana did for banking can be done by similar products in insurance and market-linked investment.
