In fact, product innovation in financial services, keeping in view the life cycle needs of the urban poor, should form the basis of banks’ strategy to bring these groups into the financial system. Banks should innovate to create demand-oriented savings, credit and remittance products that are customized to the lifestyle patterns and income streams of the urban poor.
It presupposes a continuous churning of an economy in which the new displaces the old, a process that brings both progress and stress. Disoriented by the quickened pace of today’s competition, some in our society look back with nostalgia to the seemingly more tranquil years of the early post-World War II period, when tariff walls were perceived as providing job security from imports.