LISTEN NOW: Digital Upskilling for Financial Health and Meaningful Engagement

By driving significant gains in financial inclusion in recent years we have opened up access, but access alone isn’t enough. Emerging new evidence shines a spotlight on the potential benefits from accessible upskilling to drive more meaningful engagement of financial services and digital platforms across the underserved segments that fuel the economic engines of less-developed countries – youth, informal entrepreneurs, MSMEs, gig economy workers, smallholder farmers, and more. The urgency is even greater because of their collective vulnerability amid the COVID-19 pandemic. This webinar explores how greater digital and financial literacy learning can help drive financial health and resilience to weather the storm – and at the same time drive better decisions and meaningful engagement of the products and services that can provide value.

Behavioural science is the understanding of what interventions make people jump between intention and action. For digital finance this gap is very big. So much is happening in our daily lives that we need interventions that stand out amongst the clutter. Financial education initiatives have largely failed to influence behaviour but new approaches being taken, which include:

• Data-driven efforts
• Providing the right information at the right time in the user’s financial life
• Automatic options address “default bias” – e.g. setting up a monthly amount to go into a savings account, the user isn’t required to think/act
• Targets should be meaningful and realistic

Different targeted initiatives for segments are also now being provided, such as for refugees, platform-based workers, youth, and MSME’s.

Chris’ product, Mosabi, is a fintech/edtech initiative which allows customers of FSPs to access modular-based learning and quizzes via mobile devices. Data is collected and assessed for preparedness and risk scoring of the user and then they are given access to appropriate financial products. It gives practical skills to the user and actionable data to the FSP. This is a mind-shift for FSPs away from considering financial education as a social responsibility to seeing it as part of operations that can give efficiencies such as reduced customer churn, upselling and reduced defaulting on loan payments.

 

The webinar was led Chris Czerwonka, Founder and the Chief Innovation Officer of Mosabi.