Banking & Financial Awareness GK Questions with Answers – Page 8

The Financial Stability and Development Council was set up in 2010 by an executive order of the Government, following a recommendation of the Raghuram Rajan Committee on financial sector reforms, and it is chaired by the Union Finance Minister with the heads of the regulators, the Finance Secretary and senior…

The Forward Markets Commission had regulated forward and commodity derivative trading since 1953 under the Forward Contracts (Regulation) Act 1952 and worked under the Ministry of Finance in its last years; it was merged into the Securities and Exchange Board of India on 28 September 2015, the first merger of…

The Tribunal was set up under the SEBI Act and sits at Mumbai; since the Finance Act 2017 it also hears appeals against orders of IRDAI and of PFRDA, so one tribunal now serves three regulators.

PFRDA was first created in 2003 by a resolution of the Government as an interim authority to oversee the new defined contribution pension arrangement, and it ran the National Pension System for a decade without a statute; the Pension Fund Regulatory and Development Authority Act 2013 gave it statutory standing.

The Securities and Exchange Board of India was first constituted in April 1988 as a non-statutory body with advisory functions, and it received statutory powers through the Securities and Exchange Board of India Act 1992, passed in the year the securities scam made a strong market regulator unavoidable.

IRDAI began in New Delhi but its office was shifted to Hyderabad in 2001, and this move is exactly why the question is asked: the candidate who assumes that every financial regulator sits in Mumbai or Delhi gets it wrong.

Formally the Royal Commission on Indian Currency and Finance, it reported in 1926 and recommended a central bank separate from the Imperial Bank of India; the recommendation led to the Reserve Bank of India Act 1934, and the Bank began work on 1 April 1935 with its central office at…

The Insurance Regulatory and Development Authority of India is the statutory regulator of insurance, created under the IRDA Act 1999 after the Malhotra Committee recommended opening the sector to private and foreign capital; it licenses life, general, health and reinsurance companies and registers agents, brokers and surveyors, and its headquarters…

Muhammad Yunus built the bank on the idea that very small loans without collateral, given mostly to women organised in groups that guarantee one another, are repaid reliably, and the Nobel Peace Prize of 2006 was awarded jointly to him and to the bank.

The National Bank for Agriculture and Rural Development launched the programme as a pilot in 1992, connecting savings groups, mostly of women, directly to bank branches for credit, and by the number of households covered it became the largest microfinance programme in the world.

The cap covers the repayment of all loans of the household taken together, not only the microfinance loan being considered, and the lender must assess household income and existing debt before sanctioning, which is the framework's main protection against over-indebtedness.

The framework defines a microfinance loan by the borrower's household income rather than by the size of the loan or the kind of lender, and the same definition applies to a bank, a small finance bank, an NBFC and an NBFC-MFI alike, which was the main reform the framework brought.

After the microfinance crisis in Andhra Pradesh in 2010, the Reserve Bank appointed a sub-committee of its central board under Y. H. Malegam to study the lending practices of microfinance institutions, and its report of January 2011 led to the NBFC-MFI being carved out as a distinct category with its…

A non-deposit-taking NBFC of that size is classified as systemically important, written as NBFC-ND-SI, and becomes subject to prudential norms on capital adequacy, exposure and disclosure that smaller companies escape.

The layers are the Base Layer, the Middle Layer, the Upper Layer and the Top Layer, and the regulation becomes stricter as a company moves up, so that supervision matches the risk a company poses to the system.

The Reserve Bank uses what the industry calls the fifty-fifty test: both conditions must hold, so financial assets must be more than half of total assets and the income from those assets must be more than half of gross income.

An NBFC cannot accept demand deposits, cannot issue cheques drawn on itself, is not part of the payment and settlement system, and its depositors do not have the cover of the Deposit Insurance and Credit Guarantee Corporation.

The section was inserted by the Reserve Bank of India (Amendment) Act of 1997 and requires an NBFC to hold a certificate of registration from the Reserve Bank and to maintain the prescribed minimum net owned fund before it can carry on business.

The Department of Economic Affairs in the Ministry of Finance notifies the rates at the start of every quarter, and since the Shyamala Gopinath Committee reported in 2010 the rates are linked to the yields on government securities of comparable maturity, with a spread for some schemes.

The fund was created in 1999 in the Public Account of India, all small savings collections flow into it, and the Centre and the States draw loans from it, which is why small savings are treated as a source of government borrowing.