Financial literacy

Agnieszka Zyśk-Pożoga is CR manager in International Personal Finance's Polish business, Provident Polska. The role was created in 2008. Agnieszka talks about the progress her team has been making in financial literacy.

"I joined the press team originally but it wasn't long before I found myself being drawn into Provident's active CR programme. I was involved in most of the community investment programmes already when I was promoted to CR manager in 2008. A key part of my remit is to manage our approach to financial literacy.

"Financial literacy makes sense for our business in Poland. It has a commonality with what we do as a business-and we already have so many financial experts at the company! It's also addressing a real company issue because we want consumers to make informed decisions about their finances. A market of better informed consumer is better for the success of our business and better for society at large.

"The first step was to identify internal resources and the employees who would be suitable role models and share their knowledge. We have a proactive PR team and so we leveraged our media relationships and developed educational campaigns-our in house experts wrote advice columns and responded to financial 'agony aunt' style queries. We ran campaigns with national and regional newspapers but also for audiences such as women's magazines.

"The next step was to reach out and find an organisation that could help us develop our approach to deliver a credible, meaningful programme. In 2007 we had started building our financial literacy website-www.akademiarodzinnychfinansow.pl .-and in 2008 we developed this further by adding a new module-a brochure created with Stowarzyszenie Konsumentów Polskich (the Polish Consumers Association) on "How to take a loan wisely?"

"The site is aimed at our customer demographic and is already receiving around 1,000 user visits a month.

"Another thing that's worked well for us has been the workshop approach. We teamed up with Dojrzewalnia Róż, an organisation that supports the professional and personal development of women, to deliver 'Women in Finance' workshops. These workshops, organised by the Academy of Family Finance, are run by an independent expert on financial literacy. Twelve workshops took place in 2008, benefiting 366 women.

"We've built some strong foundations but I'm going to be busy-I'm currently planning another 10 workshops across Poland as we're aiming to increase the number of participants by 10%."