On 26 September, a group of delegates from the second Russian-Chinese Young Journalists Forum visited Russia’s first Financial Literacy Centre. This is a joint project between Center-invest Bank and Southern Federal University. The group was also introduced to the Chinese-language version of the Enterprise for All online course.

The delegates were young journalists and representatives of educational and civil society organizations from Russia and China. During their visit, experts from Center-invest Bank and the Financial Literacy Centre showed the delegates around the facility and talked about new ways of increasing financial literacy.

The Financial Literacy Centre is an open forum where information about finance is provided free of charge and in an accessible and interesting format. The aim of the project is to provide young people, the working population, pensioners, and small businesses in southern Russia with free training and advice on financial issues. This will help the local population to avoid mistakes when borrowing money and carrying out other financial transactions. Over 50,000 people have received free advice from the Centre.

To improve financial literacy worldwide, since 2013 Center-invest Bank has provided a free multilingual online course, Enterprise for All, which covers the basics of entrepreneurship and taxation. Certificates are issued upon successful completion of the course.

To date, 31,600 people from around the world have taken part in this educational project: 4% of users are from the United States, 11% are from China, 15% are from Europe, and 69% are from Russia and the CIS.

The number of Chinese users has increased by 37% since the start of 2017, to 3,500. This demonstrates the high quality and practical benefits of the online course, which takes a very practical and modern approach.

The Chinese journalists spoke highly of the bank’s work to improve financial literacy and to train the experts of the future.