Why do financial service providers give their clients financial education?

The world economies are slowly becoming more and more intertwined. The novel coronavirus pandemic is one of the most obvious iterations of this fact in today’s society. The moment countries started locking down their borders that’s when the economies started going down. Like a sturdy chainlink, the restrictions on imports and exports started dragging nations down one after another. Alright, we are not talking about an apocalypse although the core idea is that the largest and strongest economies in the world have already shrunk by huge margins.

World Economy is a Chain Link

The moment borders shut down a good amount of people were left without jobs. In today’s societies, the wealth and livelihood of people across the globe heavily depend on each other. Huge corporations that harbor most of the employees are constantly outsourcing different aspects of work to miscellaneous offices across the world. Importing goods is not as easy as making a contract with some other company. That firm also has its workers who are being restricted by local laws in their own countries. What I am trying to say here is that when borders close and one country isn’t exporting X item the other suffers as well. The industry is complicated and revolves around people working on all aspects much like ants. If one cannot do his or her job the others will become unable to do theirs as well. The tourism industry is estimated to suffer as much as $1 trillion in losses in 2020. This puts as many as 100 million jobs at stake across the whole world. Someone who is working in the Estonian office of a global tourist agency making tours for customers won’t be able to perform their job if the financial office situated in Tokyo is going to be locked tight.

Apart from this, people who require traveling to do their jobs won’t be going anywhere since all of the flights are canceled or postponed till god-knows-when. The International Air Transportation Association, or IATA, has reported as much as $84 billion loss across all of the airline companies in the world. This has caused oil prices to stumble and fall as well due to the fact that the demand has fallen to unprecedented levels. People were at home, and not using cars, ships, or airplanes. Public transportation was also stationed in the parks without movement. In fact, nobody was going anywhere at all like the world has frozen in time. This has caused further job losses since oil mining companies have stopped their operations temporarily. Depending on the firm, some have sent their workers home with half salaries and others were fully laid off and left without income.

Financial institutions have become increasingly active though. Private industries started grasping for fresh air (or finances) due to the lack of customers while governmental institutions started scrubbing every penny they could to support the economy. The stimulus packages for households in the US and other countries are all exactly due to this reason. Apart from this, small to middle-sized businesses required loaning money as well to keep afloat as this is where the market is the weakest.

Education by Financial Institutions

The financial institutions as well as brokerages have already been on top of their game when it comes to educating their customers. A fair number of companies provide these materials to their users. This is mainly due to the fact that most of the reputable brokers make long-term revenue from successful traders. This means that the more of them there are the better it is for the company. The financial market was also in a disarray though but this gives bullish traders (or people who are daring) a perfect climate to make substantial revenue. A good example that comes to my mind is T1 Markets. This brokerage firm has great educational articles available for its potential customers for absolutely free. You can read more about it in the T1Markets overview but the core idea is that a good number of such financial institutions provide means to educate their users. However, this attribute is not unique to brokers. Sometimes even the financial regulators make programs available for the citizens to take part in.

People started flocking to financial institutions like exchanges to start making some kind of revenue since they were locked into their houses waiting for the infection rates to die down. Trading, however, is not the safest investment to do in life. When the funds are running out everyone requires to be as knowledgeable as possible to decrease the chances of losses. Although it is true that there are a good number of freely available educational articles, books, and videos online that will teach you how the market movement in the foreign exchange market (Forex, FX) is it’s still not going to be enough to safely start investing and this is where additional resources from brokerages and other institutions come in.

It does not matter where you are trading whether it is a foreign exchange market, stocks, bonds, CFDs, precious metals, or any other the ordeal is extremely risky. One should never trade with money that they need to survive from month to month. To alleviate the risks the South African Financial Sector Conduct Authority (FSCA) and Prudential Authority (PA) have opened education centers for people who are interested in trading. These institutions teach individuals what to be wary of when it comes to trading. How to look out for potential scammers? How to analyze markets? What tools to use? What software is available? What are the best practices in the field? All of them are covered in one way or another. This project has yielded a very good result in the region supporting the growth of interest in the field.