About the worst experiences we have as consumers are with banks and financial services. False promises in equity and insurance investment schemes, harmful outcomes of traditional insurance products, and getting locked into products you cannot get out are routine, as is mis-selling by agents and distributors. The reasons for such horrible experiences are two-fold. One, most of these are non-standard products or services. For a bar of soap, production and benefit features can be standardised; so all bars will do the job of cleaning. Not so for financial services, where some products will work for some customers and will not work for others, especially when it comes to market-linked products. The second reason is poor regulatory enforcement, especially for banking and insurance services. The Reserve Bank of India’s (RBI’s) regulatory philosophy is to issue guidelines and create a process of grievance redress. It is not too interested in finding out how these guidelines