Consumer RightsPersonal FinanceNovember 12, 2013by Monika Halan0Sebi gives RBI a chance to clean up mis-selling by banks
Regulatory turf wars hurt consumers of finance. Mis-selling mutual funds by HSBC Bank fell in the cracks between RBI and Sebi.
Consumer RightsExpense AccountPersonal FinanceOctober 29, 2013by Monika Halan0Dr Rajan, will RBI look after consumer protection finally?
RBI needs to wake up and smell the coffee. Banks need to be regulated when they sell third party financial products.
Expense Account, Mint When I met the head of one of the largest private sector life insurance companies last week in Mumbai, he was clear that the 1 October 2013 deadline to re-engineer the traditional (money-back, endowment, whole life) plans in life insurance would at most be breached by two weeks to a month. (Market-linked...
Expense Account, Mint Imagine this: there is a large hospital chain of national scale. Doctors are salaried employees and they’re found to be prescribing medical products that are harmful to their patients. They recommend these products as they carry higher kick-backs from the drug companies. For example, they prescribe drugs that are known to cause...
Expense Account, Mint Ramesh Kumar is disgusted. At 55, he’s had a long innings as the administrator of the Indian Paneer Board. (For those unacquainted with paneer, it is a milk product that used to be in short supply in the glorious socialist years of the 1960s and 70s and the government had set up...
Expense Account, Mint I must admit I’m a bit surprised by the kind of debate that the Financial Sector Legislative Reforms Commission (FSLRC) Report (http://finmin.nic.in/fslrc/fslrc_report_vol1.pdf) has generated. The 439-page report has made recommendations to re-haul the Indian financial system to facilitate the journey of the $2 trillion Indian economy to becoming a $15 trillion one...
Expense AccountFebruary 13, 2013by Monika Halan0How to steal a trillion
Expense Account, Mint When one lives in a country of over a billion people, big numbers seldom come as a surprise. But when I looked at the number of Rs.1.5 trillion, I was astounded. That’s about 1.5% of the Indian gross domestic product, was the first thought. But the number in the excel sheet looked back...
Expense AccountNovember 7, 2012by Monika Halan0Banks vs retail investors
Expense Account, Mint The Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corp. Ltd (HSBC) has been in the news in the past week for all the wrong reasons. Globally, the bank has been under pressure not just for mis-selling in the UK but also for allegedly violating the US anti-money laundering laws. Its third quarter results have a...
Expense AccountJune 22, 2011by Monika Halan0RBI’s unanswerable 29 questions and lessons for merchant bankers
Expense Account, Mint As a rookie reporter I was petrified that I would not be able to provide enough detail in a story under the editing keyboard of my editor. After looking stupid several times, I would set out to interview with a list of questions that included the name of the CEO’s dog, the...
Expense AccountMay 11, 2011by Monika Halan09 billion pounds: UK banks’ compensation for mis-selling insurance
Expense Account, Mint Last week just as my Twitter feeds got active with links to the British Lloyds Banking Group blinking in its fight with the regulator, the Financial Services Authority (FSA), and agreeing to a £3.2 billion (Rs 23,427 crore) provision to meet insurance mis-selling claims, we at Mint were following the PricewaterhouseCoopers story.Mint reported that while...