At Claro, we’re on a mission to make wealth accessible to anyone. We’re helping to create a new generation of savers and investors who are both ethically and financially informed, inspired and confident. We’re aware that this is a big mission, and that’s why we’re starting with the basics: learning and community.
Everything begins with breaking down the most significant barrier to accessing financial information. Jargon!
The financial sector communicates in code language
This makes it difficult for the regular person to engage with it. Liquidity, maturity rate, compound interest, diversification are just a few examples. These are essential concepts which, when understood in simple terms, can make a big difference to someone’s confidence when it comes to money.
Why is money still seen as a taboo?
Another aspect getting in the way of bringing financial education to everyone is the taboo around talking about money. As one of our team members always says, “we’ll talk about sex before we talk about money!”. That’s the second barrier we want to break by holding the space for honest conversations to happen and for community learning to take place. Ultimately, we want every single person to feel invited and welcome to ask any questions about personal finance.
Wealth should be for the many, not the few
And this leads us to the final barrier (for today!). That’s believing that wealth generation is for us. Because relevant financial information is hard to find, hard to understand, and we don’t talk about it, we don’t really know who is doing what. Nor do most people have the role models to inspire them to take charge of their financial wellbeing. We want to highlight the good examples of great financial educators. People who understand these challenges and support others by sharing their story, their hurdles and victories.
What we’re doing about it
To help bring this vision to life and powered by our focus on learning and community, we’ve run the first edition of our ‘Intro to Saving and Investing’ course. This is a live online course made up of four 90 minute sessions, supported by a facilitator, a WhatsApp group and a set of key resources such as podcasts, videos and ebooks.
The experience takes the participants through a journey from reflecting on the life goals that money can help them achieve to understanding different saving and investing options. They’ll also learn what to consider when looking at different options. Participants learn about other people’s financial goals and end the course by developing their own saving and investment strategy.
Here’s what our participants said about the course:
Our learning and community strategy underpins the design of this course. We believe that providing information, inspiration, a place to speak openly about money and get support from a peer group, will enable people to become more confident. This will help them blossom into competent savers and investors, making their money work harder for them.
This is a big mission, and we can’t do it alone. We’re currently hiring for a number of positions – check out our Careers page and reach out if you’d like to know more!
