Financial Education and Industry-Academia Collaboration

In partnership with ARROWS, Inc., a company that works to solve problems in the education field, we have produced a financial education program as teaching materials for high school classes to support consumer education in the wake of the lowering of the legal age of majority.
The content of the program is to help high school students become more familiar with finance, to proactively face the future planning, and to promote a correct understanding of the means to acquire financing.
This program is provided to high school teachers nationwide through "SENSEI Yononaka-Gaku", a teacher network operated by ARROWS, Inc., with 99% of high schools in Japan registered.

“Commercial Education Consortium Tokyo” is a consortium for providing finance and career education for high school students. It was established by the Tokyo Metropolitan Board of Education in July 2018 as an organization to collaborate with companies and the local community to expand opportunities for students at metropolitan commercial high schools to learn financial insights and business practices on-site and to provide the necessary classroom support for financial and career education.
Companies, non-profit organizations, universities, vocational schools, and local communities/shopping arcades collaborated with the metropolitan commercial high school to expand opportunities for the students to learn business practices including finance and careers in real-world settings.
We support the Consortium’s principles. We have been participating since the fiscal year 2018, and providing and supporting programs such as financial education.

In December 2021, the “2021 Finance Consumer Education Liaison Meeting”, a meeting organized by the Tokyo Metropolitan Board of Education, took place. Our director and officer participated as a guest speaker.
We conducted online lecture sessions with the aim of providing finance consumer education support to high school students in light of the lowering of the legal age of adulthood. A total of 236 teachers from 192 metropolitan middle schools and high schools attended the session. We expect the teachers to bring the knowledge and information obtained at the session to their schools and introduce these in actual classes and activities, thereby contributing to enhancing financial literacy of students.

Since 2020, we have been conducting financial literacy classes for 5th-grade students at Fujimino City Tsurugaoka Elementary in Saitama Prefecture, teaching the importance of "credit" and "personal information," as well as providing a basic understanding of credit cards. The classes aim to cultivate financial literacy skills, such as money management and planning for payments, to prepare students for future credit card usage.

With the lowering of the age of majority by the revision of the Civil Code on April 1, 2022, the age at which one can contract for credit cards, among others, without the consent of a parent or guardian is now 18 years of age or older. On the other hand, young people with limited contracting knowledge and social experience are easy targets for various temptations and malicious traders, and there are concerns about the expansion of consumer damage to those 18 and 19 years of age.

In response to this concern, we have released content on our website, including animations that provide easy-to-understand explanations of the credit card system and precautions for use by new adults and other young adults.

We continue our efforts to prevent consumer victimization among young people, including new adults, and to raise their awareness of the issue.

Shibaura Institute of Technology, TOPPAN Edge Corporation, and our company have conducted joint research on web service recognition and UI/UX using eye tracking and brain wave measurement, at which we established a new method to analyze whether users are likely to construct unconscious images (mental models) that trigger their actions when they use services.