Financial education needs to be delivered outside of schools, according to Carla Hoppe, chief executive and founder of Wealthbrite.
Speaking to FTAdviser, Hoppe discussed why she thought more focus needed to be put on delivering financial education to adults.
Wealthbrite is an ed-tech platform which aims to bridge the skills gap of financial literacy in talent.
“People spend a lot of time and energy thinking about how we should make financial education in schools better.
"But I'm increasingly convinced of the chronic need for financial education to be delivered in a place where people are actually going to put it into practice,” Hoppe explained.
Workplaces
She said workplaces were the number one place financial education needed to be delivered as this was where typically people were exposed to financial instruments like pensions, insurance and healthcare.
But she pointed out that currently most employers were not “going the extra mile” to explain to employees the basics of how these actually worked in practice.
“I really believe that workplaces and businesses, more generally, can be a force for good in people's lives. And it's not about giving employers another thing that they have to do. A lot of businesses sometimes feel they are already doing so much.
“Actually, this is about saying to businesses, this isn't something that should be seen through the lens of being a regulatory requirement, it should be seen as an opportunity for you to build up an employee workforce that is much more resilient in the face of adversity, from an economic perspective.
“They are also much more likely to be loyal to you as a business because they actually appreciate and understand what you're providing to them,” Hoppe added.
She would like to see the government be more direct about what it would like to see or expect from employers.
“The UK has a national strategy on financial wellbeing - the Money and Pension Service, which is an arm of the government, is charged with setting national targets on financial wellbeing.
“The sad reality is the service has absolutely no power to enforce the targets. There's no funding to really drive initiatives. There's a lot of resources that are produced and recommendations made for employers and a lot of working groups that are brought together for people to talk about things that they could do, but that doesn't translate into action.
“Unless we actually have targets that are set at a national level where there's going to be an assessment of achievement against these targets, it’s just all talk, no action,” Hoppe explained.
In terms of how financial education would be delivered in workplaces, Hoppe felt it was about looking at the employee lifecycle and where financial education could fit into the natural conversations already happening.
She said: “There are a lot of conversations at the start of someone's career, or when they're starting a new role, about an introduction to their workplace benefits.
