Financial education: from knowledge to practical behaviour
Rector Elena Beccalli’s article in these pages highlights a key point: financial education is now an integral part of citizenship. Possessing adequate financial skills means being able to participate in economic and social life with greater awareness. And, from this perspective, it is particularly important to provide young people with effective tools to make informed economic and financial decisions, whilst also understanding their long-term consequences.
Our Foundation’s experience in the field offers some insights. The first courses run with university students demonstrate, first and foremost, the importance of how these topics are approached: simple, practical content linked to real-life experiences seems to encourage greater engagement than purely technical or institutional communication. In the five seminars held as part of our financial education project ‘Uwelfare’ in Turin, Bari and Rome, 92 per cent of the university students involved stated their intention to adopt more informed financial behaviour.
This is a significant finding, but one that raises a further question: how can this intention be translated into actual behaviour? To put this transition into practice, Uwelfare has focused, in this initial phase, on supplementary pensions. This choice is also supported by research carried out by the Italian Youth Agency in collaboration with Starting Finance on financial literacy: among 20- to 25-year-olds – comprising university students and young workers – 83 per cent of respondents use a current account and 63 per cent hold investment securities, whilst only 22 per cent have set up some form of pension scheme.
Along the path from receiving information to joining a pension scheme, obstacles have emerged, such as the complexity of the terminology, procedural hurdles and, in some cases, the need to involve the family. These initial findings highlight just how important it is to complement knowledge with tools capable of facilitating its practical application.
It is also in this area that digital technology can play an important role: not only as a channel for accessing information and training, but as a tool for streamlining processes, reducing friction and making opportunities more accessible.
