Corporate social responsibility and financial inclusion: Evaluating the moderating effect of income

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A significant improvement could be seen in the CSR performance attempted by almost every business organization that contributed to social welfare through various business and social actions. On the part of financial institutions, the CSR implementations match the social preferences, specifically to ensure financial inclusion of the poor and disadvantaged. This paper suggests that financial inclusion is an attempt to bring the rural people within the ambit of the organized financial system. Also, given the current rural economic climate, rural people experience difficulties in accessing finance and repaying their debts; therefore, the need for financial inclusion is now perhaps more important than ever as it provides opportunities to avail credit, make an investment, build savings, and support poor people to meet emergencies. Whereas banking organizations undertake several CSR initiatives such as concern for the socially excluded, environmental concern, and human resource development not only for legal reasons but also to contribute something good to society, this study was done to analyze the relationship between beneficiaries' perceptions of CSR and their financial inclusion behavior. The results indicate a positive and significant association between perceived CSR and financial inclusion. Furthermore, the study rules out any moderating influence of income on the relationship between these two. It is noted that this study was limited by the nature of the sample. Being a purposive sample, the data were split into higher and lower income groups. The researchers should additionally consider the split of rural and urban respondents on geographical grounds to further expand the research outcomes. In turn, this allows future researchers to make a large sample to conduct SEM analysis. In this study, banks' CSR beneficiaries were considered as they related to the goal of the stated financial inclusion objective. In future research, other segmentation which is closely related to financial inclusion could be considered.

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