Texas State SIFE student attends HSBC Financial Literacy Program

Posted by Jayme Blaschke
University News Service
November 20, 2007

(Left to right) Angela Bertero, U.S. representative, meets with representatives from Chile and Germany at the HSBC Financial Literacy Forum.

Angela Bertero, president of the Students in Free Enterprise (SIFE) team at Texas State University-San Marcos, recently attended the HSBC Financial Literacy Forum in New York and served as the only United States representative in the morning panel discussion.

Bertero, a junior business administration major from Austin, represented the Texas State SIFE team as it placed second in an educational financial literary project competition. The Texas State entry was titled “Ask Suze” and formatted as a game show. The game show project capitalized on the popularity of current financial self-help television programming to address numerous financial literacy topics in a creative fashion. The project included a partnership with a learning center in Hong Kong and allowed the team’s message to breech time zones and cultural barriers through the sharing of 11 other financial literacy projects.

Students in Free Enterprise, (SIFE) is a not-for-profit organization supported by individuals, foundations, and corporations whose mission is to build collegiate SIFE teams who teach free enterprise in order to better individuals, communities, and countries. SIFE's purpose is accomplished through the SIFE team's outreach projects where students and faculty involve the community in the free enterprise system, providing the students with an opportunity to teach others what they have learned.

The HSBC Global Education Trust and the Corporate, Investment Banking and Markets division of HSBC (CIBM) initially launched a program with Students in Free Enterprise (SIFE) in March 2005 to encourage financial literacy with an emphasis on young people age 16-25 and financial success skills for female entrepreneurs. CIBM and the HSBC Global Education Trust funded this initiative from 2005 through 2007 in 29 countries.

For more information, go to www.business.txstate.edu/sife or contact Bertero at (512) 245-3224 or via email at ab1273@txstate.edu.