By Khalida Sarwari
Fifteen-year-old Mahir Jethanandani has a message for the big banks: Banking rules for kids, especially those who come from underprivileged families, need to change.
He has written to the president and Treasury Secretary Jack Lew, but now the Saratoga High School sophomore is taking his campaign to the masses. Earlier this month, Mahir posted a petition on Change.org to gather signatures from people who want the same things he does: the removal of bank account opening fees, the reduction of minimum balance requirements and reasonable interest rates.
“The problem is that children in parts of the U.S. are in poverty,” he said. “The issues I see are that some banks don’t follow certain standards, like zero opening fees and low minimum balance requirements. This affects some children who are poverty-ridden because they’re unable to open accounts.”
In the first five days of posting the survey, Mahir had gathered 117 signatures. In about a year from now, he hopes to gather about 100,000 signatures and present the results to financial institutions through the Child and Youth Finance International, or CYFI, a Netherlands-based organization that he’s been involved with for more than a year now.
Much of Mahir’s interest in the areas of business, finance and economics can be traced back to July 2011, when he first joined CYFI at the encouragement of his mother’s friend, Jeroo Billimoria, who founded the organization around the same time and now also serves as its managing director. For Mahir, whose passion has always been finance and personal savings, CYFI was a perfect fit. The organization focuses on promoting financial education and literacy for youth across the world and provides financial opportunities and access to financial services to children, especially those in developing countries that have low per capita incomes and high poverty rates, such as the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Kenya, and Ecuador.
Some of his peers help out at the local hospital or soup kitchen, but this–educating his peers about finance–is his thing, Mahir said.
“I want to make a direct impact on the world, and I found this as a different approach than charity or volunteer work,” he said. “And there’s nothing wrong with that, but I wanted to make a more global impact by helping children around the world in an area that I want to major in.”
As part of his petition initiative, Mahir researched the policies at Union Bank, Chase, Bank of America and Wells Fargo. He also interviewed bank managers and employees at the four banks and asked them for statistics regarding their banking policies for youth.
Through his investigation and research, Mahir found that while most big banks don’t have opening fees, some small banks do. As for minimum balance requirements, the number ranges anywhere from $1, which is the case at Union Bank, to $100, the standard at Wells Fargo. The average, he found, was about $25, such as at Citibank.
“I’d like to see the minimum balance be $1,” Mahir said. “It’s a fair number.”
Using his research and evaluations, Mahir developed a blueprint for child-friendly banking in the U.S. and hopes to publish his work with CYFI.
The petition aside, Mahir has worked on numerous projects with CYFI and has entered in several different categories of the organization’s youth champion awards. His involvement with the group has led him as far as Amsterdam, where he attended CYFI’s first annual youth summit in April 2012 and presented ideas for six policies related to child and youth finance, one of which is the survey initiative that he’s undertaking now. He also traveled to Mexico City in October to present his projects at the G20 summit.
In May, Mahir will be attending the second annual CYFI conference in Istanbul, Turkey, and there he’ll be giving a presentation about the process of launching his survey.
He also devotes much of his time to developing a website that he intends to model after the Khan Academy with videos and forums, but focused specifically on teaching children and youth about personal savings and finance. He hopes to launch the website in August. His dream is to see the site reach 100,000 page hits by the time he graduates.
And as if that isn’t enough to keep Mahir busy, other future goals include publishing the research he has conducted and write a book on investing and finance this summer.
For most people, that would be enough to call it a day, but not for Mahir. In his spare time, he invests in the stock market, reads as much as he can about finance, business and economics and works on a startup that he plans to launch sometime in the next few months.
To learn more about Mahir’s petition, visit change.org/petitions/financial-institutions-in-the-united-states-no-cost-for-opening-account-for-minors-no-min-balance-raise-interest-rates.
