Financial literacy needs a co-ordinator, not more pamphlets |
Ask a student at a Canadian high school where they learn about personal finances and chances are they will point to their bank’s website, the provincial curriculum, a federal pamphlet, or their parents.
At high schools in Japan, you’ll get a different answer – J-FLEC, the Financial and Economic Education Promotion Organization launched by Japan’s Financial Services Agency in 2022.
The only body that comes close in Canada is the Financial Consumer Agency of Canada (FCAC), a regulator that also runs consumer education in parallel with provincial securities commissions, banking sector initiatives and a rotating cast of NGOs. However, these efforts are rarely co-ordinated and often overlap, reaching the same audiences while leaving others untouched.
FCAC’s own research has consistently found that large shares of Canadians feel unprepared for retirement and struggle with day-to-day financial management. This is not because the information doesn’t exist, but because no one has made delivering it coherently anyone’s job. Canadians lack is access to consistent, trusted, institution-backed guidance, and that’s a co-ordination problem.
J-FLEC was created in direct response to a structural problem: As the country expanded its tax-exempt Nippon Individual Savings Account (NISA) program and shifted households toward self-directed asset formation, only around seven per cent of Japanese citizens reported having received any financial education. This meant the NISA program’s ambitions and the population’s preparedness were out of sync.
Since its creation in 2022, J-FLEC now stands as the most sophisticated financial literacy institution among G7 countries and already it is showing results: NISA account holders have grown to roughly one in four adults aged 18 or older, suggesting that pairing policy reform with co-ordinated financial........