Scams, costs, mistakes: how financial education protects savers
Financial Education Month kicks off: Italy tries to reduce the skills gap, but schools struggle to launch financial education initiatives
It is now a daily trickle: via e-mail, Whatsapp or the traditional text message, fraudsters attack our money. And those who are unable to recognise a genuine request for help from a family member from a bait thrown out by those who attack our money are at great risk. According to a recent survey almost 6 million Italians, about 10 per cent of the total, have suffered a financial scam in recent years (2.8 in 2024 alone). What is striking is that, according to experts, 83% of those scammed had no skills to protect them from fraud.
The ability to recognise a scam attempt is also part of the knowledge and skills that fall under the name of financial education: it means being able to protect one's money from the sights of the ill-intentioned, but also knowing how to make good decisions, identifying the lowest costs and best risk/return ratio, for example. As well as knowing how to make the right choices at the right time, avoiding, for example, procrastinating on pension choices, thus avoiding joining the pension instruments available to build a somewhat more serene future than those who procrastinate instead.
For a number of years now, Financial Education Month, promoted in November by the Financial Education Committee, has been a moment of awareness-raising to raise attention to correct financial behaviour, curbing those that are harmful to our wealth and consequently to our life goals to be achieved with money.
Financial education has also entered schools in Italy: but only seven hours a year within the civic education curriculum. There are no results regarding the experiences put in place for the 2024/25 school year from a ministerial source: initiatives arise from the goodwill of teachers and from the subjects that engage the schools, associations, foundations, market players such as banks and insurance companies, newspapers such as Il Sole 24 Ore or such as the many creators that populate the web and social networks, becoming privileged interlocutors of the youngest.
Are these initiatives useful? There is some progress, albeit modest: according to the Bank of Italy, from 2020 to 2023, the level of financial literacy among adults in Italy has risen from 10.2 points to 10.7, on a scale of 0 to 20. Looking at the declination of financial education - knowledge, attitudes and behaviour - it is the latter that have risen the most (from 4.2 to 4.7 on a scale of 0 to 9), as have attitudes (from 2.0 to 2.3, on a scale of 0 to 4). By contrast, knowledge of the subject is slightly down (from 3.9 to 3.7), covering concepts such as inflation, simple and compound interest rates and risk diversification.
