Stanford Graduate School of BusinessIFDM TPF Session 2: An International Focus on Personal Finance Teaching
Stanford Graduate School of Business
Introducing the International Panel 0:07
Natalia, from the World Economic Forum, opens the session by noting this is the first time the conference has featured an international focus rather than a US-only one. She describes her organization's Council on Financial Education, launched two years ago, which works with the private sector, athletes, technology, and even central bankers to push financial education from a nice-to-have to a need-to-have. She mentions a global survey covering 25 countries that now includes the big three financial literacy questions, with findings to be published in December.
Europe Names Financial Education Essential 5:01
Elena, joining from Universita Cattolica in Italy, explains that since September 2025 the European Commission has defined financial education as an essential life skill. Only 18 percent of Europeans score high on financial literacy, with gaps for women, young people, older people, lower earners, and the less educated. She cites that 49 percent of Europeans aged 18 to 65 could not cover three months of expenses without borrowing, 16 percent have no emergency savings, only 24 percent hold investment products, and digital finance brings new risks like fraud.
Italy Lags Behind Its Peers 10:01
Italy's 2023 financial literacy score is just 10.6 out of 20, with digital financial skills even lower at 4.4 out of 10. Elena points to cultural issues, such as family investments still being managed mostly by men and unequal treatment of newborn girls versus boys, and notes that under 60 percent of young people correctly answer basic questions on risk, inflation, and compound interest.
Catholica's Portfolio of Programs 13:02
As university director, Elena has backed a broad set of initiatives across five campuses, split between teaching activities and third-mission engagement. New government guidelines on civic education, which now include financial and digital money education, enabled a personal finance course for non-specialist undergraduates that drew over 200 registrations in two days, built with professors from banking, corporate finance, and linguistics across ten two-hour sessions covering banking, mortgages, insurance, pensions, and investing.
Training Teachers and Communities 19:01
Two programs target secondary school teachers: Personal Finance in School, starting October 16, giving teachers practical tools for their students and their own finances, and Educate to Educate, an online course running February to April with group activities, tutor feedback, and a digital open badge on completion. Elena notes further initiatives for primary school children and for vulnerable people and migrants, plus a women in finance program, are also underway.
Teaching Money Management to Children 21:31
A program developed with the department of psychology at Universita Cattolica teaches children how to manage money, combining decision processes, pro-social attitudes, critical citizenship, and text comprehension. The approach, described in the book Awareness from Childhood, moves through three stages: basic financial literacy, decision making applied to transferable tasks, and pro-social decision making. A preliminary evaluation with 95 children in two schools near Milan found gains in knowledge, a positive spillover to family economic behavior, strengthened ability to delay gratification and imagine the future, and greater sensitivity to unfairness.
Reaching Migrants and Building Networks 24:02
The Iban project helps migrants and low-income families manage money, built with Milan associations and responding to the fact that 40 percent of legal migrants in Italy lack access to formal banking, often due to limited Italian. The course starts with basic financial Italian, then uses participant-made videos and a 45-term glossary, reaching 35 people over 140 hours. A separate Women in Finance program supports young women through mentoring and job shadowing, and the speaker hopes to extend this work through large Catholic university networks spanning millions of students.
Portugal's Finance for All Program 30:00
Nova School of Business in Portugal runs Finance for All, a free ten-hour adult program tested through a randomized control trial, responding to low financial literacy in Portugal, 40 percent versus 52 percent in the EU. Delivered over five two-hour sessions on budgeting, credit, investments, products and fraud, and retirement, it is taught online and in person by trained master's students and CFA practitioners, drawing over 15,000 participants since 2022 with high satisfaction scores.
Who Enrolls and Why It Works 35:30
Data show typical participants are already better off, often educated 40-year-old women with above-average income, prompting a new effort to reach less financially literate people. Strong uptake, 87 percent attending at least one session, comes from free access, evening and online availability, the school's independent reputation, certification, and a two-stage registration that supports impact evaluation. Results after six and eighteen months show lasting gains in financial knowledge, measured through the Lusardi and Clapper questions, with the largest benefits for women, lower-income, and less-educated participants.
Comparable Gains Online and In Person 42:02
The financial literacy program showed that knowledge gains and satisfaction were nearly identical between online and in-person participants, a powerful result for scaling nationally. Graduates became more confident, more autonomous in decisions, and more likely to set savings goals. Behavioral data, including credit registry records, showed reduced reliance on revolving credit card debt, better mortgage negotiation, and fewer overdue payments six months after training, at a low cost of about twenty euros per participant.
Workplace Reach and Audience Questions 45:00
A new European Commission funded initiative brings financial education into workplaces to reach lower income, lower education employees who don't self-enroll, also testing spillover effects on coworkers and firms. Panelists discussed adapting content to cultural and local financial systems, praised interdisciplinary collaboration with psychology, linguistics, and education experts, and addressed teaching personal finance to very low income communities lacking credit systems. Closing calls to action urged destigmatizing money talk, starting small, evaluating impact, and simply beginning such programs.
AI-generated summary. It can be wrong or incomplete - check anything that matters against the original.
