Innovative Solutions in the Development of Households’ Financial Awareness: A Hungarian Example

Abstract

Financial crises put stress on the society of the country of our investigation, whose financial vulnerability is raising from high indebtedness, a history of defaulted loans, and an insufficient level of financial literacy. In this context, financial awareness has been recognised as a means for decreasing households’ exposure to financial difficulties, bridging crisis periods with the substantial precautionary holding of liquid assets, and improving their well-being over longer periods of time. Raising financial awareness is a crucial policy aim, and has been investigated in this study as well. A questionnaire survey was completed by Hungarian university students across different majors, to assess the financial literacy level of the responders from their own perspective. In addition to this, we have investigated their e-banking habits. According to our findings, different student groups (clusters) have been identified by means of Ward analysis (where the significance of clusters were tested by ANOVA). Our results confirm that across all clusters the university students place their trust in non-governmental organisations and central bank foundations rather than those of the financial institutions in evolving financial literacy. This outcome of our study may provide an argument for designing policy incentives for raising financial awareness in an institutionalised way, relying on the role of the privately funded NGOs and on the central bank.