[Natfinwellness] Natfinwellness Digest, Vol 22, Issue 3

Fri Aug 5 12:28:25 EDT 2016

Thanks for the insight, Bill!

At UC Berkeley a couple years back, we were actively seeking an official
banking partner who would, among other things, provide some funding to the
nascent financial wellness program. We grappled with two major issues:

First was the issue of lesson branding and editorial control. At the stage
of my involvement, no institution was suggesting we modify any lessons. But
we could imagine that different institutions *could* push for content that
would over-emphasize their value. For example, a brick-and-mortar bank may
want to emphasize how online banks limit, by law, clients to 6 withdrawals
a month. This limitation shouldn't be a concern for a savings account...
but emphasizing it may cause students to make a poor decision and choose a
brick-and-mortar account with a low interest rate and fees.

Our second issue was that a partnership with *one* institution would create
a conflict of interest that precluded us from recommending students work
with that institution's competitors. It could very well be that, at
contract signing, Chase happens to have the best products. But 3 months
later, Bank of America may have new and better products. Do we continue to
recommend students work with Chase? Well, as a fiduciary, I would hope not!

My personal solution to these issues would be to work with an organization
that has relationships with many many financial institutions, such as
NerdWallet (where I worked last year), Credit Karma, BankRate, Magnify
Money, etc. The aforementioned conflicts of interest would be minimized
because the university would immediately have a relationship with, say,
both Chase and Bank of America (and Wells, Barclays, another dozen online
banks, and so on). I'm interested to see how others consider this
possibility!

*Matt J. Goren <http://www.mattgoren.com/>, PhD
<http://psychology.berkeley.edu/>*
Financial Literacy Educator, Advisor, & Consultant
|| mjgoren at gmail.com | (706)202-5566 <706-202-5566>
|| Candidate for CFP® Board Certification <http://www.cfp.net/>
<http://www.cfp.net/>

<http://www.fcs.uga.edu/fhce> ||  <http://www.aspireclinic.org/> ||
<http://www.fcs.uga.edu/hmre/projectfree> ||  <http://www.arete-ws.com/> ||
<http://www.beyondberkeley.com/>

On Fri, Aug 5, 2016 at 9:00 AM, <natfinwellness-request at lists.osu.edu>
wrote:

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>    1. Re: Co-branded financial wellness centers (Bill Vanderburgh)
>
>
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> Message: 1
> Date: Thu, 4 Aug 2016 15:37:44 -0700
> From: Bill Vanderburgh <william.vanderburgh at gmail.com>
> To: National Financial Wellness Listserv
>         <natfinwellness at lists.osu.edu>
> Subject: Re: [Natfinwellness] Co-branded financial wellness centers
> Message-ID:
>         <
> CAAqbfJWD8a25uhnXuMYs2BRJnSgqbNj3kY0GzCbGcTZSkHE7+g at mail.gmail.com>
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>
> Hi Nate,
>
> I'd be interested to see any off-list responses you receive.  This is a
> topic that came up when I was starting the Office for Student Money
> Management at Wichita State University.
>
> Several considerations made us shy away from pursuing corporate
> sponsorships. As I think about it now, they fell into two sorts of
> categories, namely avoiding influences contrary to the mission we wanted to
> pursue, and realities of fundraising in a university setting.
>
> Under the heading of avoiding undue influence, the first and most decisive
> consideration we found against pursuing corporate sponsorships for a
> financial literacy office was that we didn't want to implicitly or
> explicitly endorse any particular financial institution (the likeliest kind
> of corporation to support a fin lit center) over any others.  (This was
> soon after the financial crisis, too, when financial institutions were
> looking more-than-usually morally problematic.)  Second, we didn't want to
> have to modify (or worry about modifying) our activities to satisfy the
> demands of any corporation. After all, much good personal financial advice
> would have people avoid things the banks, etc., want them to do--e.g.,
> borrowing more than they need using expensive loan products. (We may have
> been especially sensitive to this issue because the Koch brothers are major
> funders of Wichita State and the founder of Rent-A-Center paid to name the
> entrepreneurship building there.)
>
> The third issue we ran into, now talking about things under the heading of
> the realities of university fundraising, is that the university controls
> naming rights (for everything from paving stones and park benches to
> offices, colleges and buildings) and the donation level for naming an
> office was pretty high--higher than we had realistic hopes of securing, we
> thought.  The amount will likely vary by institution, but just about any
> university will insist on being involved in (i.e., controlling) the naming
> process.  A fourth issue, related to the third, is that your fundraising
> arm doesn't want you pursuing funding without their involvement--in
> particular they want to avoid situations where you ask for $10k while they
> are in the process of asking the same entity for $10M.  Fifth and finally,
> we learned that very few funders are interested in donating to support
> ordinary operating expenses, which was most of what we needed.  (Funders
> typically want to buy a thing or build a building.)
>
> I'd be curious to hear other arguments for and against seeking corporate
> funding for fin lit centers!
>
> Bill Vanderburgh
>
>
> On Wed, Aug 3, 2016 at 4:37 PM, Nate Peterson <pete2787 at umn.edu> wrote:
>
> > Hey all!
> >
> > Is anyone aware of any financial wellness centers/programs that are
> > co-branded with a corporation outside of the college or university that
> > houses the program? Feel free to email me directly at pete2787 at umn.edu.
> >
> > Nate
> >
> >
> > --
> > Nate Peterson
> > Interim Associate Director|One Stop Student Services | onestop.umn.edu
> > 222 Pleasant Street SE, 225D Bruininks Hall
> > University of Minnesota | umn.edu
> > *pete2787 at umn.edu <pete2787 at umn.edu>*  | 612-625-0160
> >
> >
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