Sowmini Prasad

Sowmini G Prasad is a policy and finance professional with over 9 years of work experience. Over the 5 years as senior research associate at Dvara Research, she has closely studied the regulatory design of India’s financial system, with a special focus on banking and insurance, and the design of India’s public health insurance schemes.

She has experience in designing, leading, and executing research projects focused on both systemic issues core to the effective functioning of the Indian banking system and consumer issues while engaging with it. Her body of work spans short-term projects and multi-year studies, leading field surveys and conducting interviews with last-mile consumers and financial service providers. In her most recent project, she led a study for Sa Dhan, involving a survey of over 700 microfinance customers and interviews with 30 microfinance leaders, to understand their experiences of RBI’s new microfinance regulatory regime.

She was part of a 3-member team that undertook a comprehensive and in-depth assessment of transparency levels in the Indian banking system’s public disclosure regime.

Sowmini has published in peer-reviewed journals such as the Economic & Political Weekly and Frontiers in Public Health on regulatory design of life insurance delivery and the design of commercial health insurance in India. She has written pieces for leading news agencies on policy-relevant themes. She is a Chartered Accountant under ICAI (2012) and holds a master’s in public policy from National Law School of India University, Bengaluru (2019).