Leading the pack on financial education
Following the release of our Sustainability Report 2015, our Director of Sustainability, Kirsty Britz explains how supporting financial education is helping today’s customers and those of tomorrow.
We opened branches on bank holidays for customers who canât make it into a branch at any other time.
At RBS we believe we can, and should, help people understand money. It's estimated that only 45% of 18 to 24 year olds feel confident in managing money. This continues in adulthood, with research showing 22% of people could not read the balance on a bank statement. That’s why we want to do our bit by continuing to support the financial education of our customers, and future customers, in a number of ways.
In 2014 we auto-enrolled newly opened accounts into Act Now Alerts to help build customer awareness around avoidable fees and charges. In 2015 we delivered over 345 security awareness events to over 10,000 customers. In addition to this we opened branches on bank holidays for customers who can’t make it into a branch at any other time and we removed incentive payments to all frontline staff, ensuring that when our employees are advising customers their primary motivation is that individual customer’s needs.
One of the biggest steps we’ve taken in the last year is revitalising our MoneySense programme. MoneySense has been running for 21 years and is now one of the longest running financial education programmes for young people. It's helped approximately 6 million young people learn about managing their money and will reach another 1 million 5-18 year olds by the end of 2018.
With steps like these we can start to make a difference. We think it's all part of being a good bank.
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