Citibank Inks Innovative Financial Literacy Partnership

In one of the latest moves by a multi-national financial services firm to improve financial literacy throughout the world, Citibank is partnering with the Jakarta administration and Bank DKI to develop and launch financial education programs in Indonesia.

One of the sparks for jump-starting this initiative was the fact that a 2013 survey conducted by the Financial Services Authority (OJK) yielded results showing that fewer than thirty percent of students possessed sufficient knowledge relating to financial and economic topics. As a result, Citibank began working with the Jakarta administration and Bank DKI to determine ways in which those statistics could be meaningfully improved.

A centerpiece of this program will be Citibank’s comic character, Agent Penny, which has been the focal point of other Citibank financial education initiatives in such counties as China, Singapore and Hong Kong. In fact, the Agent Penny Series has been running in Hong Kong based on the comic book concept since 2005 and has shown strong positive results. The Agent Penny comic book enables young students to understand personal finance topics in an interesting and age-appropriate matter.

From the standpoint of Indonesian government officials, they are looking to utilize the program as part of their larger effort to establish an overall financially educated and cashless society. Given similar missions of other countries throughout the world, we should anticipate seeing similar partnerships emerge amid the continuing growth and success of the financial literacy movement.