Video: Jane Rooney’s closing remarks for the 2018 Research Symposium on Financial Literacy
Transcript
Jane: My gosh, that was so so kind. Thank you, Kelley. I want to thank my team because it’s thanks to them that this got together and of course to Dilip and all his team but I’ll get to the thank you’s first because really I want to say thank you to all of you as well. It’s really tough, actually, to close such an incredible event. Over the last couple of days, we’ve had such such great discussions. I loved the interactivity from everyone in the audience. You’ve been an amazing group of people, asking hard and really important questions, but also bringing to light some really incredible ideas. So thank you. It’s been a really, really rewarding time for me personally. I have learned so much over the last couple of days and I want to thank you for that as well.
I also loved the opportunity to of course catch up with folks I already know, but it’s lovely to meet new people in this space and to me, it’s incredible that after almost five years in this role, I’m still meeting new people who have this shared passion for financial literacy that I do and that the team does. So wonderful to meet new people.
I also want to go over a few of the themes because as we close out the topic over the last day and a half, it’s probably important to sort of think through what were some of the big big things that we talked about over the last day and a half and I think some of the ideas that we’ve heard, you know, financial vulnerability, it’s an increasing issue for the middle class in Canada who are very high leveraged. We talked about, you know, as interest rates rise, we’re seeing an increase in the vulnerability and in fact the financial stress that goes along with that. This is a huge problem because again, we heard on another panel, that financial stress affects people’s cognitive ability. It makes it increasingly difficult for people to make financial decisions.
We also learned though about the factors around financial well-being and the important study that was released and shared here that summarized the global survey between Norway, Canada, Ireland, the U.K., Australia and New Zealand. The important commonality that we heard was that active savings – sorry, proactive savings behaviors actually increase financial resilience. What an important important finding. And in fact, active savings improves overall financial well-being dramatically as Becky described in the Canadian results. Phenomenal! So that’s a huge improved knowledge that we bring today that we didn’t have yesterday. So thank you.
It reinforces actually some of the research that we’ve seen in recent years. You know, active savings is key because it helps people set aside savings for unexpected expenses and in fact, that in turn reduces financial stress and you know, we keep hearing that financial stress is the No. 1 stressor, so we really have to address that. We also heard that it’s really important to undertake initiatives that address attitudes and behaviors. We heard a lot about confidence and that was really important. The idea of behavior, of keeping up with the Joneses and trying to combat that, I thought that was fascinating.
I was also struck by another comment that was raised yesterday about the importance of talking about money. You may not know, but in the Quebec strategy that complements the national strategy, talking about money is one of the key themes. We talked a little bit about, you know, starting young. Again, that was super important because it reflected results that we released last year, PISA, an international study of 15-year-olds, talking about money at home, learning about it at school and learning by doing the key findings. That was spoken about several times by different speakers yesterday. I thought that was super important.
It’s also really useful that today we’ve learned a lot about some innovative interventions that have helped consumers to plan, manage their money, save and those are the key themes of course of the national strategy. I think it’s phenomenal that they are now initiatives that you are all aware of, that help people do those things, plan and save for their financial future and manage their money and their debt. So thank you for that.
I’ll speak to two big conclusions that I’ve drawn from this event and really, it’s firstly the quality and the amount of research in the financial literacy field has continued to grow. You know, Dilip talked about this event a number of years ago. Over the – over the past several years, we’ve seen the growing impact and growing knowledge base in the research community, but what’s really important is the influence, the second big theme is the influence of researchers collectively through your work and through your findings is having an impact. It’s providing us as government, policy-makers, practitioners, with really important information. It’s really really helping us push the boundaries of financial literacy, so thank you for that.
This gathering has really shown that the relationship between the research data and financial interventions in the marketplace continue to strengthen and earlier, my colleague, Bruno Lévesque and his panel referred to research informed practices. So I truly believe this event helped us advance our shared financial literacy journey by continuing to build a bridge between researchers, practitioners, policymakers and others on the front line.
We know that not every organization has the funding or the capacity to do research and that’s why, you know, collaboration, information-sharing at this kind of an event is so critical. It’s opportunities like venues, symposiums like this, Dilip, you’ve had a number of them, it’s important for us to share. Information-sharing is key.
As FCAC has done in the past, I’m pleased to let you know that we will be doing a summary report for this event and that we will be sharing it with others and it will be available early in the new year. Also in 2019, I wanted to share with you that FCAC will be fielding the financial capability survey. We had reference to the 2014 findings in a number of pieces of research that were shared yesterday. We conduct that survey every five years. It’s an important capture – capturing of Canadians’ knowledge and behaviors concerning their financial decision-making. We’re going to be adding a few questions actually to this iteration of the survey to get into a little bit of a deeper dive on some of the particular issues.
We know lots of stakeholders rely on this information for your research, so we’re going to make it easy to access for all of you. We really want to share the data. We want to make sure it’s in the right hands of the right people. It’s important to share it with, you know, all of you on the front line, the researchers, teachers, educators, financial advisors in the financial community and all stakeholders.
I now want to turn to say my thanks as Dilip and Kelly have done in the past. First and foremost, I really want to thank Kelley Keehn for your amazing emceeing of this event, but also for being an incredible financial literacy champion. You’ve raised the bar in the media, you have done a phenomenal job to help me and those at FCAC, but you also continued on the commissioner’s consumer protection advisory committee, so thank you so much for that.
(applause)
I also want to thank all the outstanding moderators, panelists and speakers at this event. It’s incredible that you all came from far and wide across the world to share insights and I really appreciated that. Amazing dialogue! So thank you. I think the furthest person that we have is Celestyna from New Zealand, but of course, you know, we have Nick and Elaine from the U.K. and I want to thank you very much and lots of friends from the U.S. I hope I didn’t miss any of the countries, but raise your hand if I missed you, but thank you very much for all of your incredible insights.
(applause)
I also want to really thank people for their hard work on the poster presentations. I hope everyone had an opportunity to visit those folks who – who shared their research. This is an incredible opportunity to share some of the in-depth findings that our colleagues have done. So thank you very much for all of that work.
(applause)
I also want to thank a very special group of people, our national research subcommittee. Many of you are here in the room and I would really like to thank you for helping us pull together an amazing agenda for your participation, your active engagement on all of these sessions. For those of you who are not familiar with this research subcommittee, they advise my research team, but also myself on research related matters. They generate empirical evidence that feeds into the national strategy for financial literacy and it’s really a pleasure to work with all of you who are so motivated and I would love to ask all members of the research subcommittee to please stand up and be acknowledged by your colleagues here.
(applause)
So this is actually the second iteration of the research subcommittee and we’re continuing our hard work this afternoon with a meeting to look at the national research plan. We talked about a research progress report that we released recently, but this is our work to continue the progress on the national research plan, but this symposium wouldn’t have been possible without the incredible people that worked on pulling it together and I really want to thank first my team here at FCAC and please join me in thanking Becky, Bruno, Steve, Chris and Nicole. I’m not sure if I see everyone, but please thank – thank my team.
(applause)
And some of you may know, Marcie was also a huge contributor to this and actually Marcie is now on maternity leave. She has a beautiful little boy. And of course, thank you so much to our co-hosts, Dilip and your team here at Rotman and BEAR. It has been an incredible partnership and I want to thank you so much for your professionalism, for your incredible collaborative ideas and as you know, many of you know, I’ve had the opportunity to do a number of events with Dilip and you’re always a joy to be – to participate with. I learn so much from you and your incredible passion for this space is very very welcome. So thank you.
(applause)
And last but not least, I really want to thank everyone in this room for your passion, for your ideas, your amazing dialogue throughout the last day and a half and for attending and please, please share information that you’ve learned here with your colleagues and with all Canadians. We really hope that in your time here, you gained new insights, that you met new people, maybe found some new collaborative ideas. I thought there was kind of a collaborative idea there with Mylo, I’m not too sure, you guys might have some matched savings partners, it would be kind of cool. But I just want to say that FCAC is very proud that some of our work has actually led to others replicating some of our work and I’ll just showcase, like Australia has actually taken our national research plan. They’ve invited FCAC and Steve will attend that event to share our expertise in what we’ve done here as a community to develop a national research plan. So that’s pretty incredible.
The national strategy for financial literacy has actually been shared of course internationally, but we’ve really helped some developing countries develop their own national strategies and the latest was actually Tanzania. I was very pleased that, when I was at the international meetings in May, someone from Tanzania came up to me and said, “Do you remember that I met with you three years ago? Thank you. We’ve created a very similar framework” and they’re actually undertaking a consumer protection framework in Tanzania as well.
So let’s keep the momentum going. This is – has been an incredible couple of days and I really look forward to continuing to work together and to work on research, but also what’s next. We have to take this research and put it into practice and this is going to be a wonderful journey together. So thank you again for a great couple of days.
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