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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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- Technology
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- 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.
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- Health Care
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Boosting Gender Equality Through Entrepreneurship: A Q&A with Pro Mujer CEO Maria Cavalcanti
Maria Cavalcanti is president and CEO of Pro Mujer, one of the largest women’s development organizations in Latin America. In this Q&A, she discusses the changing nature of women entrepreneurship, the organization's embrace of technology and for-profit structures, and her ambitious plans to make Pro Mujer "a one-stop shop for empowerment for women in the region."
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- Health Care
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Want to Know How to Properly Measure Financial Inclusion? Copy the Retailers.
To better understand and measure how people use financial services, i2i looked outside the industry to the retail sector, which is at the forefront of how to collect and analyze data on how consumers engage with their services. In particular, retailers understand key usage indicators fundamental to their business; namely recency, frequency, monetary value and duration. That led i2i to apply these indicators while studying how to improve financial services.
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From Kentucky to Kenya: Celebrating Financial Inclusion’s Potential – And Facing its Limitations
The financial inclusion industry is arguably more innovative and attuned to the needs of low-income clients than ever before. But how much of an impact can it make in a world where the problems of poverty and income inequality increasingly plague not only low-income countries, but wealthy ones too? We discuss the issue as NextBillion's Financial Inclusion Month concludes.
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Three Reasons Financial Health Matters – And Not Just for the Underserved
Forty-three percent of Americans struggle to pay bills and make credit payments, while 23 percent of workers making $50,000 to $99,999 a year are living paycheck-to-paycheck, and underserved Americans spend $141 billion in fees and interest to meet their financial needs. That's why, as the Center for Financial Services Innovation puts it, "Financial health matters to all of us." Today (June 27) CFSI and other mission-based organizations are celebrating #FinHealthMatters Day, to highlight what we all can do to improve financial health.
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- Technology