• Top five calls to action
• Government endorsement of National Strategy 
• Action points  

"How do we change the culture from 'spend, spend' to 'save, save'?" 

Top five

1. The current economic situation is a ‘teachable moment’ for financial education – we need to grab it.
2. Communication to consumers needs to be simpler, more up-front and less reliant on the numbers and the figures.
3. Different groups of people have different levels of knowledge and need targeted communications.
4.  Support for financial education is vital – support from education, the government, the finance sector and from all of you.
5. It’s in the finance sector’s interest to invest in financial literacy.  

"Financial illiteracy is widespread and can have dire consequences."

National Strategy for Financial Literacy

Action points

There are opportunities for all of those who attended to act on the many points made at the summit. Each participant will have come away with different perspectives. Here are some of the next steps:

Retirement Commission

• Work with the financial sector’s key representative bodies and the Government to help New Zealanders understand how to get good financial advice and how to better recognise sound financial products. This means setting the right frameworks through regulation and education so that good financial advice is available.
• Investigate the introduction of a quality mark for financial education.
•  Work with the Ministry of Education and the Education Review Office to monitor progress with integrating personal financial education into the curriculum and provide support.
• Work with others to promote teaching resources and evaluation techniques for seven basic unit standards in personal financial education to industry training organisations and educational institutions.
• Continue to identify and test different channels and resources to ensure we reach a wide range of New Zealanders.
• Continue to develop good evaluation methods to assess the effectiveness of different financial education programmes.

"It's not what people know but how little they know."

Financial sector

Discussion at the session Financial sector role in financial education identified a number of actions for the sector: 

• Senior people in the industry need to take the lead.
• Investigate imposing a levy on financial institutions for financial education.
• Use the right media for the right people (e.g. 82% of Kiwis have access to the internet). 
• Share knowledge and expertise about financial education within the sector.

"We need to make financial education easy and mainstream."

Education sector

A wealth of ideas came from discussion at the session Financial education in schools and tertiary institutions for promoting financial education to schools and tertiary institutions.

Schools:

• Promote financial education to teachers during their initial teacher training.
• Approach boards of trustees to get them to embrace the concept - target regional boards of trustee groups.
• Develop networking between schools to support the introduction of financial education.
• Promote success stories - use social media e.g. Facebook; share ideas and stories at principals' conferences.
• Introduce professional development for teachers not just on how to teach financial literacy but to upskill their own financial literacy.

Tertiary institutions:

• Identify what's in it for tertiary institutions.
• Understand student needs and requirements.
• Develop funding mechanisms and infrastructure for financial education.
• Showcase good practice.
• Make financial education compulsory for students wanting to take out a student loan.

Research community

Two actions were identified at the end of the session on research and evaluation; Financial literacy; what do we know, what don't we know and what do we need to know?

• Agree the outcome we are trying to achieve from financial literacy - both short term and long term.
• Focus on the short-term behaviour changes, and what the indicators of these might be; undertake more long-term evaluation studies.