I’ve been blown away by the response to what we’re doing.
Every week, we have some business, parent, teacher or combination of the above getting in touch with us either to wish us well or ask how they can help us.
It seems that the fight for a more financially literate New Zealand isn’t ours alone. It’s something that a lot of people out there care about. And why wouldn’t they. It’s coupled to our collective well-being. Social benefits, unemployment, the national taxation structure—we can’t avoid it, we’re all in some way directly or indirectly affected by the entire economic ecosystem.
The most unforeseen genuine well-wishing has come from a place I really didn’t expect it to. The corporate world. This sounds naive and ignorant, but please refer back to my inclusion of the word genuine. I somewhat expected corporations to want to be involved in what we were doing in some way, but the sceptic in me thought it would be more of an arbitrary involvement.
I’m ecstatic to say, I couldn’t have been more wrong.
They really want to help. They really want to help Banqer, a small fledgling kiwi startup. They want to help our cause, and they want to help us as individuals.
One partner in particular I’ve been pretty taken aback by. Although we haven’t really anything of measurable significance collectively yet, I’m blown away by their commitment to what we are striving for: a better New Zealand through financial education - and let it be known this isn’t directly how they make money. That doesn’t matter though, they do really care about it. Visiting their offices I see this etched on their walls. I see schemes run internally to achieve this and not published to the world for some form of social currency. This isn’t about likes, hearts, retweets or upvotes. This is about them giving a damn.
I find this refreshing.
My view of the corporate world was tainted a little from personal experience, but things seem different now.
I feel like the edges have softened out there. Things feel smaller, more community minded, less viciously profit driven, more caring. The corporates I cross paths with regularly are no longer just playing a short-term, narrow-minded game. They have the long-term in sight. They’re planting seeds today, happy to wait to harvest in ten, fifteen or twenty years, because they know the yield will be all that much greater and the taste will be all that much sweeter.
These are the friends of Banqer. And I’m really proud to have them as my friends.
