Devangshu Datta: Money, marriage and manager

VIEWPOINT

A few months ago, a friend of mine sold her flat in DLF and moved to Mumbai. The buyer was also a woman. Both the buyer and the seller are in their mid-30s, high net-worth individuals (HNIs) working in the finance industry. Both are married to HNIs. My friend had financed the flat through a bank loan and the buyer was also taking out a mortgage. Both were obviously qualified to make their own financial decisions.

There was one key difference. My friend made the purchase and sale decisions herself, after seeking her spouse's opinion. All the buyer's negotiations were conducted by her husband and father-in-law. The lady was picking up the tab; the investment decision had clearly been made on her behalf.

A couple of weeks after I was privy to this transaction, another couple of my acquaintance were pushed to the brink of divorce. The contentious issue was that the wife refused to chip in to help her in-laws buy property on terms she thought unfavourable.

This was an HNI couple that had conducted a "love marriage" after meeting as MBA students. The in-laws were outraged that the "bahu" (who earns about as much as their son) would have any opinion at all about her disposable income. The row led to the couple eventually cutting off ties with the husband's family.

A few days ago, a friend who was researching an article about women and home loans started chatting about available data on the subject. When I recalled these incidents and a couple of others, I realised that there's a serious problem about disaggregation.

How do you discover the decision-maker? Assuming one had the data, a little mining would reveal how many women take home loans. It would also reveal the marital and earning status of the women concerned. It would then be easy to isolate the benami deals on the basis of income.

But in many cases, the woman is investing her own income and yet, she isn't making the decisions. There are married, earning women whose husbands make their decisions. There are married, earning women who make decisions themselves. There are single, earning women whose parents tell them what to do and there are also single, earning women who make their own decisions.

It is crucial for a financial marketer to figure this out. A multitude of studies on behavioural finance across several markets shows that there are significant gender differences in attitudes to financial risk. Women are more risk-averse, less prone to overconfidence, and less likely to "churn". Financial marketing has to be targeted and optimised to cater for these differences.

But you cannot find the decision-makers in the Indian context simply by querying databases on gender, income and marital status. You need to ask more sensitive questions and the biases of traditional Indian values may well get in the way of this.

It is implicit in traditional Indian values that a woman doesn't make investment decisions. If she has an income, well and good""but she's supposed to let her "male guardian" (father/husband/elder brother) do what he considers best.

This is less paternalistic than the system prevailing in apartheid-era South Africa, where women were not allowed to have separate bank accounts. (In the absence of a convenient male relative, the pastor of the local church could be a designated joint account holder in the RSA of yore).

But this is being challenged by 21st century demographics. More and more women are earning higher disposable incomes and many of them are extremely financially sophisticated. It is absurd, for example, to expect a bank relationship manager or a chartered accountant to have no opinions about her investments.

I suspect that this clash of traditional Indian values with market realities has much to do with rapidly rising rates of divorce. How often is marital discord caused by the woman making her own investment decisions? Finding an answer to that question could be a very profitable exercise.