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

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

December 24, 2010

Christmas Eve 2010 in Mumbai, India. We finished three interviews today. We spoke with two people at ICICI bank. I am really glad that we stayed and talked to them. It was in a pretty nice part of Mumbai. Just business parks, almost like Irvine, California. We only had the two bank meetings but then we also met Praveen for lunch at the Cricket club, which was pretty fancy. We got some great audio recorded. In the afternoon we went downtown to meet with State Bank of India. We were a half hour late because we stayed and talked to Praveen for too long, but SBI seemed to not mind. SBI was in a great part of downtown, but I was surprised by their operation. It was quite different than ICICI. As it was Christmas Eve we were looking for something to do. Avi was sick so we didn’t go to his white Christmas party he was planning. We were in the catholic portion of the city so I considered finding a Catholic Mass to attend. The night before we went to Olive, a chic club in Mumbai, and stayed there way too late. I think we got home at 3:00 am. I’m not going to lie, it was much more fun than I expected. Lena is taking off tonight to go to the airport and I leave tomorrow night. Our journey is coming to an end.

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.

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

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

December 20, 2010
We came back from Jharkand on Thursday and found Lena at the hotel. We stayed at the Ramada Plaza which is a real five star hotel (made affordable by once again putting all four of us in one room!). Thursday night we went to Olive and then to Urban Pind. It’s a club that has expat night every Thursday night. We got there and the bouncer asked… “Are you here with Fashion TV?” “Yes, Yes we are!”. I love it. We got some good photos. There were a lot of Russian models there. Lena tried to introduce me to them but it was just really awkward. They didn’t really have much to say and I didn’t have much to say. Friday night we got into the grand opening party for the new club at our hotel and it was full of Bollywood stars. We met a bunch of stars and one of them hung out with us for most of the night. The pictures tell the story.
Saturday morning we visited the Jaipur region. I didn’t have high expectations, but it was amazing. We agreed that the Amber Fort on the hilltop was more impressive (if not more beautiful) than the Taj Mahal simply based on the size and ambition of the construction. It was fun to hang out with the whole team in a more relaxed setting. We drove back Sunday morning. Jack left Sunday night and Team FAB was downsized to three.
We went and spoke with Rajesh at UID again. He lined us up with key appointments for the coming week. We had some great Indian food for lunch and then went to meet with a bank. I was surprised about how well the meeting went. We came back and I took a couple of laps around the pool. It was outside, so every breath was of brown pollution.

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

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

December 16 2010

We met the man in charge of rural development. He told us how UID is enabling the government to quickly reduce the costs and time of delivering employment benefits in the rural areas. He showed us the current steps and how long each takes. It generally takes 8-10 steps to get a payment out to a person in a rural area and one to two months. UID enabled accounts will make it three steps and the goal is to bring it down to one week. That would be a huge difference since most rural people don’t have access to credit that allows them to eat if their payments are late. He said that the government hasn’t quantified everything in terms of money because some of the savings is in time and convenience and nobody has a good grasp on the monetary value of this time savings.
We got dominoes pizza again. Being in Ranchi though was educational, but I don’t think I plan on living there any time soon.