Young Factor

“Young Factor” is an Osservatorio project that embraces a new civil and social challenge: improving the economic and financial literacy of Italian students and eliminating the competition gap between them and their European peers. In order to overcome the competitive spread within Europe and to launch this challenge, the Osservatorio has chosen new partners ― four great banking institutions in Italy: Intesa Sanpaolo, Banca Monte dei Paschi di Siena, UBI Banca , and UniCredit. The project sets out to offer different levels of economic and financial training, each tailored to the individual student in order to support their acquisition of new skills in this field and to ensure that these students increasingly become masters of their own lives. The “Young Factor” project is the final step in the citizenship training program that the Osservatorio began with the “The Quality Information in the Classroom” project.

Training: The teacher is the conduit by which the Osservatorio’s educational project can begin to take shape within a school context, passing our educational and civic aims onto their students. Teachers are constantly assisted in this task by a team of collaborators and a dedicated call center that deals with responding, throughout the school year, to doubts and questions about the project.

Textbook: A textbook and accompanying worksheets are made available to both teachers and students by a team of professors from the best Italian universi ties. As well as authoring both the textbook and worksheets in association with the Osservatorio, these professors have helped create 10 instructive videos as part of the project.

Meetings: Crucial to the “Young Factor” program are the local meetings and debates with journalists and experts such as “Young Factor: a dialogue between young people, economics and finance,” Various yearly project launche s ha ve hosted authoritative and influential figures of the world of finance such as the ex-Governor of the ECB, Jean-Claude Trichet, the Governor of the Bundesbank, Jens Weidmann, and the Governor of the Central Bank of Holland, Klaas Knot. The governor of the Bank of Spain, Luis Maria Linde, and the Governor of the Bank of France, Francois Villeroy de Galhau, were the paramount figures of the 2016/2017 edition. During the 2017/2018 school year, notable figures Ewald Nowotny (Governor of the Bank of Austria) and Jan Smets (Governor of the Bank of Belgium) attended the initial meeting, and Carlos Costa (Governor of the Bank of Portugal ) covered the closing. To inaugurate the 2018/2019 edition of the initiative, Jens Weidmann, Klaas Knot and Ignazio Visco returned ― together ― to the Osservatorio's stage. All of the meetings allow the students to have honest, straightforward, and engaging discussions with national and international guests.

Research: As with the “Quality Information in the Classroom” initiative, this project is monitored by research conducted by experts from a research institute. This research helps assess the levels of satisfaction and learning in the financial education offered to both students and teachers.