• A woman working in the private sector decides to stand on her own feet (financially) before getting married.
• A young girl starts working for an NGO immediately after completing her studies. Seeing the suffering, she decides to devote her entire life towards serving the underprivileged while staying single. She also wants to be financially independent. Her zeal is missionary but she is unsure about how to support this financially.
• A woman’s husband is struggling to find a job. After failing to get a job in India, he finally gets a breakthrough in an African country. The pay is good but the living facilities are not. He decides to go alone and leave his family behind in India. His wife has to manage household expenses with two kids in school.
• A man loses his sight, and subsequently his job, upon meeting with a car accident. Now his wife, a homemaker, is required to manage the finances of the house, something she had never handled earlier.

There could be many more stories of women like those mentioned above. While some succeed in taking charge and changing their lives; there are also some, who buckled down under pressure.

As a client-centric finance professional, how do you help such women? In order to start, one must understand the nuances – the similarities and differences alike. Consider the following questions:

• Are women different from men?
• Do they need different financial products?
• Are women incapable of handling their family’s financial matters?
• Do women make better investors or worse?
• Are women bigger spenders than men?
• Do women think differently about money?
• Do all women think or behave similarly when it comes to money?

These and many other questions are important to understand. In other words, this is the KYC required for one to be able to put the clients’ interests first. Only if you know about the clients’ needs, mindset, fears, concerns that you would be in a position to understand their interests, without which you cannot practice the “client first” approach.

Let us look at the first two paragraphs of chapter 1 of our latest book, “Moneywise – Perspectives for women”.

The opening shloka of the first chapter of the Bhagwad Geeta starts with the word “dharma”, and the closing shloka of the last chapter ends with the word “mama”. The Bhagwad Geeta, recited by Lord Krishna on the battlefield of Kurukshetra as a sermon to his friend and disciple Arjuna, is about “mama dharma” – my duties.

The subject of personal finance also is about “mama dharma”, where personal matters come before finance with applications in and relevance to life itself. The uniqueness of people’s respective situations makes dharma different for every person.

Given that, it is important to understand the perspectives of women in different situations. The book continues further:
The situation of a working woman is different from a homemaker or that of the mother of a special child differs from one whose adult kids have settled abroad. Our book is an attempt to provide a perspective on issues women face in life – directly or indirectly – related to money, including stories about how some women chose to resolve their issues.

– Kiran Telang and Amit Trivedi

“Moneywise – Perspectives for women” is a book co-authored by Kiran Telang and Amit Trivedi. The book can be purchased from Amazon here – https://www.amazon.in/Moneywise-Perspectives-Women-Kiran-Telang/dp/B09J5482GB/ref=sr_1_1

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