The value of feedback and considering multiple viewpoints
By Julia
[I]t is vital to consider multiple viewpoints, especially the client’s.
The benefit of receiving feedback part way through a project simply cannot be overstated- it prevents you from getting too focused on one thing and committing to the wrong plan. In the case of our project, interim feedback was the prompt that I needed to stop overly focusing on the issue of underbanking and start considering other aspects of creating our clients financial literacy program plan.
Initially, my focus fell on underbanking because it seemed like a vital roadblock to Moldovan women even being able to consider other aspects of financial literacy. Those suspicions were confirmed when our group met with Mark Williams, a Questrom finance professor who also works with the financial literacy nonprofit FitMoney. Professor Williams described the path to financial literacy as a staircase, with one of the first two steps being access to banking services. Without access to a safe place to store money, it is virtually impossible to build assets and ultimately pass money down to future generations.
However, in discussing this with our client two things immediately became clear. Our client specified that she does not want to do the bank’s jobs for them. Ultimately, she believes that they should be motivated on their own to do the work of bringing on new clients and that it shouldn’t be up to her to convince them that there was a benefit to them in making banking accessible. It also became clear that our client was looking not for a program they could run long term, but one that they could set up and then pass off to a trustworthy partner to run. Considering the Moldovan bank’s issues with corruption and trustworthiness, it had to be considered that a bank might not be the best partner for a program like this. If Moldovan women do not trust the organization they choose to partner with, it would be much more difficult to convince them to participate in the program.
Overall, my takeaway from the interim report is that it is vital to consider multiple viewpoints, especially the client’s.
From the start of our project, we wanted to make sure that whatever we did ultimately helped our client build a program that was sustainable. If I were to only focus on the aspect of the problem I thought was important and did not consider my teammate or the client’s viewpoints, we would run the risk of coming up with a recommendation that is simply too far from the original issue, rendering it useless.
While I still believe that the particular roadblock of underbanking in Moldova must be researched or addressed in some way, I am now very amenable to it not being the sole focus of our project. It feels like a related but ultimately separate project that deserves it’s own focus.