Part VI: MBA Student's Research Financial Access At Birth

The following is written by Brent Peterson MBA 2011 for his Applied Management Research Project:

December 23, 2010
We had an interview with FINO. Unfortunately I missed the ‘record’ button so we missed a lot of the information that we got. Bummer. However, we took notes and discussed it and reconstructed our conversation in the taxi ride home. On the ride back our taxi driver hit another car. The other driver came out of his car and started hitting our driver. It was a really uncomfortable experience. We didn’t really know what we were supposed to do. After he hit him a couple of times he just walked away. We then went to some Italian restaurant where they kicked us out yesterday. They were about to kick us out again because it was after 3:00, but when they saw that we were the same people that they kicked out yesterday they served us. It was the first time I had beef in a while. Priya had to leave to meet some of her family in India so our trio was down to two.
We flew to Bombay. We almost missed our flight when it got moved up, but after some hurrying and some stress we ended up making it with plenty of time… only to find out the plane was delayed anyway! I thought Lena’s traveling curse might be to blame.
We met with the BCG team working with UIDAI and some of the other UID folks on Tuesday night. We had a great two hour discussion and asked them what they thought the benefit of FAB would be. Viral _____ of UIDAI had some really interesting points. We have it all recorded. Half way through the discussion one of them said something like, “This is off the record, right?” They were surprised we were recording the whole thing. We assured them that it was for internal use only and they would have absolute editing power in the end. I think that assuaged their fears. We met with EKO earlier and had a great meeting with them. They have an interesting model where all the banking is done through mobile phones. Monday we met with Ashok ____ and we met with Panjab National Bank. Our meetings were very productive.