In recognition of Financial Literacy Month, SIFMA President and CEO Kenneth E. Bentsen, Jr. hosts a discussion with Lisa Hunt, Managing Director and Head of International Services at Charles Schwab, and Melanie Mortimer, President of the SIFMA Foundation.

In this episode of The SIFMA Podcast, they explore the critical role of the financial services industry in advancing financial education, the work being done by Schwab and the SIFMA Foundation in supporting financial education, and the impact of their programs on communities across the country.

Kenneth E. Bentsen Jr.: Hello. And thank you for joining us for this episode of the SIFMA Podcast. I’m Ken Bentsen, president and CEO of SIFMA, and your host today. I’m delighted to be joined by Lisa Hunt, Managing Director and Head of International Services at Charles Schwab, where she leads global products and services and drives strategic initiatives for the firm. Lisa is a member of the SIFMA Board of Directors and a former chair of the Board of Directors, and she’s also a member of the SIFMA Foundation Board of Directors.

I’m also joined by Melanie Mortimer, President of the SIFMA Foundation. The Circle Foundation is dedicated to fostering knowledge and understanding of the financial markets overall. Drawing on the support and expertise of the financial industry, the SIFMA Foundation provides financial education programs and tools that strengthen economic opportunity across communities and increase individuals’ awareness of and access to the benefits of the global marketplace.

In honor of April being Financial Literacy Month, we will hear from Lisa and Melanie on the responsibility the financial services industry has in supporting financial education and the work of the SIFMA Foundation and Schwab, and the program impact and innovation, and more. For comments and questions, listeners can reach us at [email protected]. And now let’s begin. So, Melanie, the SIFMA Foundation has been operating for nearly 50 years. How does its work continue to be important?

Melanie Mortimer: Thanks, Ken. And thanks for having me speak about personal finance and the need for financial education during financial literacy month. Also, thanks to Lisa for sharing really valuable insights to why this is so critical for the financial industry and to all of us. We’ve been really focused on ensuring that people have the skills, tools, and information to be able to navigate their financial lives, for almost 50 years here at the SIFMA Foundation and I’d argue that our mission is getting only more important. Children are making financial decisions earlier than ever, especially if you look at what they’re doing online: spending, lending, paying, saving, borrowing, even investing, and even before they’re 18, and so by equipping them early on with the tools. the knowledge that they need to research, fact-check and inform these decisions, I believe we can set them up for long-term success. But there is a gap right now in access to financial education. So while 9 out of 10 parents believe it’s critical for their child to learn personal finance, only 2 in 10 of them actually feel confident in their own ability to teach their children about personal finance and investing and that means we rely on schools but only 27 states currently have any kind of requirement for a course in personal finance to graduate and that leaves a really big gap for the SIFMA Foundation to fill.

Bentsen: Taking that a step further, given all the work that the foundation has done over the years and the data that you’ve seen as the leader of the foundation, how can early exposure to financial concepts shift the economic trajectory for young people and their families?

Mortimer: The first one I would refer to is compounding interest and the power of compounding. So if you start early in life with investing, then obviously you have the ability over a longer period of time to benefit from the power of compounding. And I would say it’s the same thing with financial literacy or personal financial education that, we start early in life at the SIFMA Foundation, going to classrooms as early as fourth grade and, equipping educators, to be able to teach students about what most adults consider to be complex economic principles, but that are actually really quite fundamental. We know that investing, which is a, a component of SIFMA Foundation’s educational programs, is essential for wealth building. We really believe that the building blocks for a better economy, a better democracy, are embedded in this financially literate population that the SIFMA Foundation aims to support and sustain.

Bentsen: So Lisa, thank you for being with us today. Let’s talk about the work of Schwab and its partnership with the SIFMA Foundation. How does Schwab support efforts to improve financial literacy and help develop the next generation of investors?

Lisa Hunt: I think it’s a great question and obviously, at Schwab and around the industry, so many of us take this, important part of our work very seriously. And at Schwab,  we really think of this as a multi-pronged approach where we bring our financial resources, our expertise, our employee volunteers, and even our advocacy to bear to support this important cause that affects most Americans, regardless of their socioeconomic status. Our work really starts with financial education for kids and continues across adulthood, helping to build the practical habits needed over a lifetime. You know, financial literacy and learning just doesn’t end when you leave school. It really is something that we believe is ongoing, in particular for, those that choose to also become investors to help reach their goals and grow their wealth.

We do it in a number of different ways. We we have a number of nonprofit partnerships and grants where we partner with the country’s largest youth-serving organizations, as well as other teachers serving in regional organizations to really try to reach and engage with youth around financial education wherever possible. First and foremost, we are a big supporter and advocate of the work that the SIFMA Foundation does. But we also support the Boys and Girls Club of America. We’ve created a custom financial literacy program for their members and have really worked through that program with thousands and thousands of youth that are in those important programs. We support donors’ Choose, a teacher funding mechanism that really lets teachers, deliver financial education by funding different classroom projects. We’ve worked with Girl Scouts modernizing their financial literacy badge series, and even the 4-H, most recently where we’ve expanded their digital learning capable cities. We have over 33,000 employees, and no matter what their role or expertise, we really want them trained to be engaged to change teens’ life through financial education and work and we do extensive volunteer training to really deploy these employees out into the field, and out across the country, into these many programs.

We also take our responsibility around our expertise and the resources that we have seriously. We have free financial education content available to help families, teens, adults, everyone really become like lifelong learners around their financial success. We have schwabmoneywise.com, which is a free public service financial education website. We have Money Talk, which is a biweekly personal finance column on LinkedIn, and we do hundreds and hundreds of workshops around the country a year, educational events that are tailored to teens, to clients, to employees of our, workplace, participant programs, and communities around the world. So, we spend a lot of time thinking about it because it’s such an important part of serving Americans and investors around the country.

Bentsen: Yeah. That’s an incredibly comprehensive program and seems to have tremendous reach, across the country and deep into American society. You know, as mentioned, you’re a member of the board of the SIFMA Foundation board of directors, which has a bunch of programs. How is Schwab partnering with the SIFMA Foundation and why is that so important for the industry to support financial literacy?

Hunt: First, Ken, I would just say for the industry at large, it is really imperative for all of us to really work towards supporting the great work that the SIFMA Foundation does. We’re all members of SIFMA, and that foundation work is so critical to really helping every single individual becoming an investor. So in many ways, when we’re supporting the work that the SIFMA Foundation is doing, we’re we’re really helping to ensure that we have future clients and future investors coming into the financial services industry. So it really is a business imperative when you think about it. But our commitment is deep and long with the SIFMA Foundation since since 2018, actually, we have partnered with the Super Foundation to support and fully underwrite the Capitol Hill Challenge. And for those of you that might not be familiar with the program, it’s a 14-week financial education program that centers around the stock market competition where student teams kind of compete against each other in hypothetical online portfolio management. It’s a great way to educate about diversification, about long-term investing, even though it’s only a 14-week program, about all the different types of asset classes, stocks, bonds, and mutual funds and what we like about this program is, it really is a competition and the Foundation works to match members of Congress, with particular schools in their district, usually charter schools, and, and or in underserved communities. So it really is a great match and it, it gets a lot of competition even on Capitol Hill. And it has a long reach, the Capitol challenge in 2024. And we’re, we’re sort of in the mix right now in 2025, but 650 middle school and high schools across the country were in the program. Over 50,000 students were reached to participate in this program. And when we reached those 50,000 students, there really is an echo or a ripple effect as they engage with their friends that aren’t in the program, their family, their parents, their caregivers it does connect a lot of dots.

We’ve recently expanded that partnership to support the growth of the SIFMA Foundation with other programs. You know, the SIFMA Foundation work is really important to us. While so many education systems make financial literacy part of their curriculum, there is such a critical gap to fill in many of the communities across the country that maybe don’t necessarily automatically engage with our firms. So we just believe it’s imperative that we make basic financial literacy a national priority. It’s a consistent issue with bipartisan support, we continue to see more and more states adopt a mandate around personal finance as a requirement to graduate high school, and we just need support and funding at the SIFMA Foundation to really help deliver on this priority and the programs that are out there.

Bentsen: Well, I mean, I just have to say it’s really commendable for Schwab on the financial contributions that you made to that program and I can attest to seeing when when those top ten schools come to Washington to meet their representatives and you see these kids, and they are kids, from all over the country, from every different part of the country. They are so incredibly impressive, what they know what and they’ve learned through this process. It’s really quite something, hats off to you and your colleagues at Schwab for underwriting that program with the Foundation.

So, the Foundation reaches hundreds of thousands of students each year through the many different programs. And, along with that, you have thousands of financial professionals who are engaged in those programs and going into schools, and you even have members of Congress, who engage and, through your programs. And so I’m thinking of things like the Invest It Forward program, InvestWrite, Capital Challenge, and other similar initiatives. Maybe you could talk a little bit about some of those.

Mortimer: Thanks, Ken. The Foundation has a portfolio of programs, and you’ve named a few and we’re very fortunate to get funding from many of the SIFMA member firms and, Schwab, of course, with Capitol Hill Challenge. We utilize this funding and support to help drive a number of goals. First is the SIFMA Foundation Stock Market Game Program, which has reached 23 million youth in our near 50 year history, gives youth an opportunity to invest in a hypothetical a hundred thousand dollar portfolio of stocks, bonds, mutual funds, ETFs and while they’re doing that, learn through a curriculum that maps to subject matter requirements from English Language Arts to Mathematics to Family and Consumer Sciences. So we give teachers a reason to want to teach personal finance. There is nothing more powerful in that scenario and to support the SIFMA Foundation Stock Market game program than to have a real-world financial professional speak to the students and speak to the teachers, or invite them to their offices to see firsthand what a trading floor looks like.

One of our other programs, InvestWrite, is an essay competition, and students write an essay about a long-term investing scenario. Usually, something that they’re saving for, it might be for college or maybe even for their retirement, which for a 9-year-old is a long way off and almost unfathomable. But they do come up with interesting scenarios. The Capitol Hill Challenge is very unique in that we seek to connect students in high needs schools across the country and in every single congressional district to their local member of Congress. And that gives them insight to civics and to understanding the connections between the capital markets and the activity they see in their stock market game portfolios. So those teams compete in a national cohort every spring. Again, we give them opportunities to meet with their members of Congress. The members of Congress will go to visit the schools, talk to the students, or even have virtual visits with them online, along with their staff members so that young people can see how critical this sector of our society is and how they may wanna get involved.

Lastly, the one program I haven’t spoken about is our newest initiative called Stock Market Game Invest Quest and this is actually an online digital platform that is a much shorter period of time than the stock market game that allows, participants just to log on to www.stockmarketgame.org and try out an asset allocation exercise, where we’ve expedited five years of real marketplace activity and given news prompts so that the user makes important decisions about how to redirect their balance of their portfolio and ultimately, you’re competing against the S&P.

Bentsen: That’s great. Maybe dig into why is this so important for the industry? Why should you, beyond the SIFMA Foundation, beyond SIFMA, why should our industry be so invested in promoting financial literacy?

Hunt: I mean, at its core, financial literacy literally has the power to change people’s lives, and I know at our work in most of our firms, we feel like we’re doing that every day with the clients that we’re serving. But the financial literacy work is so much broader and really has the power to deliver on what we do today with our clients, more broadly across the country. Financial literacy really can be that great equalizer that can help alleviate many of the social issues our country faces. Things like wealth inequality, gender inequality, et cetera. When people have the knowledge and skills to make informed decisions about their money, it really does open the door to a better future, a better financial future, but just a better future overall. Americans estimate that the lack of financial literacy costs them over $1,000 in one year based on some research at the National Financial Educators Council did last year and we just know from our own work that people that understand basic finances have a budget, have a plan, just feel a lot more confident about reaching their goals and are able to make much more impactful decisions. So at Schwab and at the SIFMA Foundation and the work that we do together, we really are committed to helping the next generation achieve financial freedom by filling the gap that we know there is today across many schools and communities, but really even across many adults around the country as well.

Bentsen: A question I was thinking of is, and you got to this a little bit when we’re talking about economic trajectory but from what you’ve learned through the Foundation and all the students that it’s reached, how does financial capability prepare young people, not just for being discerning consumers, but for being savvy workers, investors and entrepreneur?

Mortimer: Well, I would say, well, first of all, the financial industry is evolving and so are the skills that are needed to succeed, so we’re exposing students to a number of the skill sets, the soft skills, as well as the hard skills. So they’re learning some of the technical knowledge, but they’re also learning things like teamwork, because they’re working on teams, they’re learning about decision making.

Bentsen: So Melanie, you’ve been the leader of the SIFMA Foundation for a number of years now and during a period of tremendous growth in terms of both the the number of students across the country, that participate, the number of schools, the number of programs, so there’s already been a lot that’s happened on your watch. But having said that, what’s your what’s your long-term vision for The Foundation’s role and its impact.

Mortimer: The need for financial education has never gone out of style. If anything, as we talked about earlier, it’s just becoming more critical. The gap is not closing, societally or globally, because there is an increase in how involved our financial lives have become. And so, for us, we really wanna take the success that we’ve had over the years and multiply that. We’ve been reaching around 500,000 – 600,000 youth per year, and we want to drive that up to a million per year. So we’re offering new kinds of programs. For example, this summer we’re going to have a free national stock market game summer session, and that’s going to be offered to all user types. We encourage families to try it out with their children because we think this is going to help close some of the gaps in the summer learning loss. But also, what a fun way to connect with your children. We’ve always benefited from the insights, the expertise, and the support of the financial industry and SIFMA member firms in particular.

Bentsen: So, Schwab has its throughout its incredible history has been a leader in leveraging technology to connect with your clients to grow the business. How are you all using technology and other emerging tools to enhance your commitment to financial literacy?

Hunt: Technology is a game changer in so many ways, but when you think about the power that technology has to provide greater accessibility, a broader reach, it really is an incredible tool that we can leverage with this important work around financial literacy. At Schwab, we always try to meet people where they are, and that’s for our clients, those that are just starting to engage in investing, those that have been investing for a very long time. people, very young, people older in their lives and technology is such an integral part of enabling us to be able to connect with them. It’s increasingly difficult, especially at the youth level to break through the noise and capture someone’s attention. I mean, I think as adults, we all feel just so inundated with social media, with 24-hour news cycles, and that’s really compounded with the youth audience that thinks and acts maybe a little bit differently than we do. And that technology really helps us connect with youth in a way that they wanna consume content and it really helps us.

We have always been an innovative company. We’ve always really pushed on the technology as a way for us to create more accessibility for all investors to the markets and investing. But it’s really helping us with the programs for our younger folks that we’re working on. An example of this, I mentioned we work with the 4-H and we created through, our foundation a new interactive online learning platform called Clover and they’re using that because that interactivity is really how they’re connecting with their 4-H members that are in middle school and high school.  On the other age of the continuum, those much older, we continue to invest in technology as a primary means for us to help educate investors. One great example is our paper money feature, which is within our thinkorswim trading platform. It is a great tool for anybody, whether you’re 12 or 200, to really get into a platform through our thinkorswim and practice trading using real-time market data, real-time market activity, the only thing that isn’t real is the money that you’re risking, so you can really get in there and test strategies. It’s similar in many ways to the way that the stock market game is run, but it’s a great tool.

And then we have so much free educational content and we leverage technology to not only create some of this content, but certainly to deliver it in a way people wanna consume it when they can consume it on our website, on our mobile site and our social media and digital platforms, were focused on delivering shorter, more consumable content as one way to connect with folks that are very busy in their lives. And then we constantly are using data analytics to search, to determine what financial education topics people are searching for most.

Bentsen: So that’s a lot of different ways to touch people in terms of understanding the markets. Well, as you’ve said, the program, targeting kids in schools, it’s definitely impacting and reaching families, the educators in the schools, and professionals, as you mentioned, from the industry that participate. How can they and others access the Foundation’s resources?

Mortimer: That’s a great question and thanks for giving us the opportunity to help direct the audience to the various tools that we have. The stock market game is available online, individuals can simply log on to www.stockmarketgame.org to register for the program. SMG Invest Quest, the 30 30-minute investing exercise, is also available at that same website. Invest It Forward is the website that we have for volunteers. It’s not only a resource hub for presentations and materials that facilitate an in-person or virtual volunteer opportunity, but it also has a matching function where volunteers can connect to teachers who are looking for support with their students and their classrooms. And then lastly, with Capitol Hill Challenge, again, I would direct users to www.stockmarketgame.org.

Bentsen: In closing, what advice would you offer to those seeking to learn more about investing and navigating financial markets?

Hunt: As we say at Schwab to our clients, you need to own your tomorrow, and that is an important mission for all of us to make sure that every single American, every investor, can really own their tomorrow, and we provide many tools, as I shared. And so I guess my advice would be, take advantage of what’s available to you, visit schwabmoneywise.com, or encourage the youth around you to do the same. We have a lot of content, even recently added contact just for teens, as well as resources for teachers. That’s a great place to start to get grounded in financial acumen, terminology, and personal finance. And then for those of us in the industry, really get out there and talk to schools and community groups and see where we can help as an industry in implementing financial literacy lessons. This is really an important public-private partnership. We only have less than I think two-thirds of the states that mandate financial education before graduation, I’d like to see that be 50. But we can do a lot in the interim to help, especially in those particular locations, counties, and communities where it’s not mandated to provide that support to those communities. We’ve got that great Money Talk LinkedIn newsletter. I would sign up for that, and there’s plenty of other free material on the internet that’s available. But get started, have a plan about how you’re gonna get started, and leverage the so many tools that are available today to help us all become better educated with respect to our finances.

Bentsen: That’s great. Well, thank you, Lisa and Melanie, for our discussion today, and thank all of you for listening in. To learn more about SIFMA, our work to promote effective and resilient markets, please visit us. Visit us at www.sifma.org, and to learn more about the SIFMA Foundation’s work, please visit the About SIFMA Foundation page on our website.

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