Financial Literacy Coalition Announces New Initiative

by | 03/10/14 | Commentary, Uncategorized

In a shining example of success achieved by a financial literacy coalition, the St. Louis Regional Unbanked Taskforce has documented approximately 1,600 newly banked individuals in St. Louis, while simultaneously exhibiting a retention rate over 95 percent.  The task force is comprised of a coalition of 20 banks and a broad range of community organizations and agencies.  The coalition was launched to address some startling statistics that came out of the FDIC’s 2011 Unbanked Household Survey, which highlighted that 111,000 households in St. Louis were unbanked, while 222,000 household were under-banked.

Further underscoring the success of the coalition’s work is that fact that the net family savings from these new accounts has totaled nearly 2 million dollars on an annual basis with an average of $1,200 savings per family.

To heighten their already successful initiatives, the coalition, along with St. Louis City Treasurer Tishaura Jones, just announced their strong support of Bank-On Save-Up St. Louis, a program with a primary objective of opening  20,000 bank accounts for unbanked residents in the St. Louis metropolitan area.  Kudos for the work already accomplished by the coalition – and the new initiative appears very well positioned to be successful in the weeks and months to come.

Among the chief objectives of the task force is to recognize and address barriers that historically have made it difficult or impossible for unbanked and under-banked individuals and families from accessing traditional banking services.  In order to do this, they develop best practices for the enhancement of traditional banking services for low and moderate income unbanked and under-banked households throughout the St. Louis metropolitan area.

Based on the success achieved by the coalition to date, many industry observers credit the task force for educating, encouraging and empowering their target population to gain greater access to banking services and to boost their levels of financial literacy so that they can become more effective and successful in managing their personal financial affairs.

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