RBI Grade B Officer 9 Nov 2019 Paper

Question Numbers: 159-163
Read the passage and answer the following questions.
With 2.5 billion people around the world still excluded from the formal financial system, there is growing interest in how to extend financial services to the "unbanked", many of whom live in extreme poverty in developing countries. Their exclusion from formal financial services forces them to rely on risky and expensive alternatives, which stifles both individual and macro-level economic development.
Evidence also shows that people want savings, and demand for savings accounts outstrips demand for credit in sub-Saharan Africa. But the problem for many of the poorest people is that they simply don't have a good way of doing it. As Nelly Otieno, microfinance specialist with Care Kenya pointed out, in the absence of any savings vehicles, excess cash has tended to get put into something like livestock. A poor woman with spare cash invests in a chicken. There's quite a __________ between that form of investment and the kind of formal products provided by banks.
That's where community-led savings groups have a role to play, and what surprised Otieno was the fervour with which people joined these groups and how quickly they demanded more advanced products as a group and wanted to invest individually too.
"In the past three years, we've seen a huge demand coming from these groups," she said. "Initially it's to start saving, but in time as they build the confidence they want to increase their savings, and as they increase their savings they also want to invest more in their own businesses."
The seminar discussed how graduation from these community-led savings schemes into a wider array of formal financial services is potentially risky. It is at this point, for instance, that many financial services providers might identify an opportunity to step in and offer all sorts of products to a burgeoning customer base, which may or may not be in the interests of those customers.