Video: FCAC’s use of financial literacy research

Bruno: Thank you, Kelley, and good morning, everyone. And thanks for the short summary. For me, the biggest takeaway from yesterday and the biggest surprise, I guess, is to see this group of moderators coming so prepared with PowerPoint slides and presentations. And I said “My God, am I the only one without slides for tomorrow?” So I spoke with one of the moderators at the end of the day yesterday, and I asked her, I said, “Well, do you always come as prepared to when you're moderating a session?” And she said, “Not at all! Actually, it's your folks back at FCAC who required all the moderators to come with slides. So what's funny is, then, when I asked them a couple of weeks ago, I said, “Well, I'm moderating, I don't think I'll need any slides.” They said “Ugh, you don't need slides, you'll be fine”. (Laughter). So either they played a trick on me or they played a trick on all the moderators that you saw yesterday. (Laughter).

So anyways, I wish to thank my colleagues, of course: Steve, Becky, Chris, people back in Ottawa, as well as Dilip and colleagues, for organizing this great event – Liz. So I guess this morning's panel will be a continuity to what we've seen yesterday, but with a slightly different dimension. So the focus will be this morning on how –– we'll hear about how research findings were incorporated into really cool interventions. But before we actually turn to the panel, just wanted to say a few words around, you know, a little context around what we want to present to you today, this morning.

If I had a slide, you would see on it a great cycle diagram of basically the ideal world and research as it applies to the financial literacy interventions work. And of course it starts with research. So research is key to inform, to find – to fill the gaps, to find gaps as well. And a lot of the research actually is key in informing the interventions that are aimed at improving the financial literacy of Canadians. So research informs practitioners and informs programs. Often, while it starts with pilots. Importantly, evaluation is part of the picture as well because we need to understand as researchers how the interventions impact the intended population. And then it feeds back. So after the interventions take place, well, it should feed back to more research because, through the evaluation, more information is being made available to researchers to see how actually things can be tweaked to further enhance the impact of the interventions.

So it's really easy for me to give you an illustration of that cycle from an FCAC perspective because we have the benefit of having a very integrated structure within the organization, which allows us to do both research on the one hand and also interventions through consumer education programs, financial literacy interventions, etcetera, on the other hand. So the illustration I just wanted to give you this morning was basically the work that started with the elaboration of a nation— of Canada's national strategy on financial literacy, more or less five years ago, and what basically led to this strategy. Basically, it started with a lot of research. So it first took the form of public consultations across the country to find out the needs that were expressed by Canadians, the gaps, and what were the views of those Canadians and the groups – the community groups, the practitioners that we're working with in terms of where they thought the focus should be put.

And not only did we run consultations, but we also fielded the Canadian Financial Capabilities Survey that I'm sure you're familiar with. And as part of the process, there was a lot of analyses, a lot of research that took place based on this data set. And you have heard yesterday that one of the key findings was around budgeting. So as part of the literature review we had done, we saw a lot of research that were actually taking place in the field of financial literacy, around the field – around the issue of budgeting and to what extent it helped consumers prioritize spending and make better financial decisions. So that took place on the one hand, and the financial capability survey results also told us that, and we heard that yesterday, that, although fewer than half of the population indicated having a budget in place or keeping a budget, those who actually did have a budget in place, 93 percent of those indicated that they were able to follow their budget on a regular basis, which was a pretty significant result in our minds.

So changing hat from research to financial literacy interventions, what we actually started focusing on at the agency was to say how can we get Canadians to budget more. And this is basically what led us to working with The Carrot. And you were all there hopefully yesterday to see Nicole's presentation and demonstration on The Carrot around the budgeting objective and all the good, positive impacts that those had on the participants. And I have to say that the experiment didn't necessarily end there. Actually, more research will continue to take place because we want to continue following those consumers. So it's taking slowly the form of a longitudinal study on the one hand, but I have to remind you that the key focus of this intervention was to actually draw participants to FCAC's tools and information around budgeting to help them put a budget in place.

So we have tools, we have information, but on those tools, the research has also informed, including the research led by Dilip and colleagues, around how to best embed the learnings from behavioural insight in, for example, budgeting tools: for example, creations of avatar, and putting things in a way that will make more sense for consumers. So at the same time as we are drawing people towards our tool, well, we are planning to improve our tools based on this behavioural research. So more to come. We're working currently on improving those tools, and we will conduct research to actually evaluate the impact of those new interventions.

So that was just a quick example based on my personal world, working at FCAC. But we're really fortunate this morning to have a panel of distinguished speakers who will provide us with their perspective on how they were able to integrate learnings from financial literacy research into their interventions. So with us today we have – we should have four distinguished speakers. Oh. The fourth is here. Thanks for being here.

So first we have Dean Estrella, who is the Financial Empowerment Manager of Asset Building at Momentum in Calgary. And Dean will talk to us about very interesting projects led – a project led by Momentum looking at leveraging tax time saving. Next we will hear from Steve Vanderherberg, who is the Director of Strategic Initiatives at WoodGreen Community Services here in Toronto. He will talk to us about building evidence-based services delivery relating to financial empowerment. Doug Sarro from the OSC. Doug is the Senior Advisor of Research and Regulatory Initiatives with the Ontario Social Securities Commission. And he will talk to us about providing gamified coaching using behavioural insights. And last, but not least, Phil, who just joined us, Phil Barrar, who is the founder and CEO of Mylo. And for those of who may not be familiar with Mylo, it's a pretty cool app – application that helps consumers save and invest.

So please join me in welcoming Dean to the podium, and a good hand for the panel.