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Common Cents Lab Opens Applications for 2018 Financial Services Cohort
Each year, the lab collaborates with chosen financial services providers to custom design, test, and launch new features and products that aim to increase financial well-being for 1.8 million low- to moderate-income (LMI) households in America.
- Categories
- Finance, Impact Assessment
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Why Gyms Love January: Leveraging Behavioral Economics for Financial Health
People are famously irrational when it comes to financial matters. We can't seem to resist wasting money on things that we know aren't beneficial. Why do we make self-defeating financial decisions, and how can we be persuaded to change them? Evelyn Stark, financial inclusion lead at MetLife Foundation, discusses the ways financial service providers are leveraging behavioral science to help their clients spend less and save more, in the latest NextBillion podcast.
- Categories
- Finance
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Common Cents Lab Unveils Millennial Financial Regret Spending Report
Conducted in partnership with Qapital, a fintech app focused on helping people save and spend better, the new study surveyed 1,000 Americans between the ages of 20 and 36-years old to identify which purchases they regarded as either most regretful or most satisfying. Through this effort, the team of behavioral economists isolated four positive personal financial habits that others may emulate to improve financial wellness and fulfillment.
- Categories
- Uncategorized
- Region
- North America
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Peer pressure, applied well, boosts financial health
When you’re working to reach a financial goal, friends can be equally helpful. Peers can influence how much you save for retirement, determine when you choose to retire and even shame people into paying their taxes, studies show.
- Categories
- Technology
- Region
- North America
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Runaway Trains of Thought: How Boosting Cognitive Bandwidth Can Fight Poverty
Cognitive bandwidth allows humans to reason, focus and resist impulses – and unfortunately, we have only a limited amount of it. Everyone struggles to make decisions when they run low on cognitive bandwidth, but the added stress of poverty consumes more of it. Creating simple ways to free this bandwidth, whether through money or time, can elevate helpful anti-poverty programs into transformative ones, according to ideas42.
- Categories
- Health Care
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Mobile Podcasts: A Cost-Effective Way to Boost Financial Literacy in India
As a reader of this blog, you likely find it easy to read and understand instructions about basic banking processes, and breeze through simple transactions like ATM withdrawals. But what about those who lack literacy skills, or who are just getting introduced to the world of finance? Mobile phone podcasts, particularly those delivered to targeted audiences in their language, can be a solution. With the potential to reach more than 1 billion mobile subscribers in India, mobile phone podcasts could bring financial literacy to underserved communities.
- Categories
- Technology
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Why Low-Income Families Don’t Send Their Children to College. Hint: It’s Not Always About Money.
Household income is not the only limiting factor as to why children of low to upper-low income families do not attend or save for university. Significant behavioral reasons are also involved, and ESCALA, which helps families save for higher education, worked with BFA’s customer insights team to identify and develop a plan to help overcome a few of them.
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Venezuela asks the UN to help boost supply of medicines
Venezuela's President Nicolas Maduro has asked for help from the United Nations to boost supplies of medicine. Mr Maduro said the UN had the expertise to normalise the supply and distribution of drugs in the country. Venezuela's Medical Federation said recently that hospitals had less than 5% of the medicines they needed. The president blames the problems on an economic war against his government and the sharp fall in oil prices.
- Categories
- Health Care
- Region
- Latin America