Natalia Mezhenska, CEO of OTP Capital
“You are an asset management company, part of the large international OTP group. What makes you run a financial game for schoolchildren, if it is, in fact, far from the area of your concern?” – You have no idea how often I’ve been asked that. It is a high time to discuss the point of the game, our intentions to make it up, and the outcome we have reached.
Conditional reflex to spend
It was an average day when I just asked my youngest son how much pocket money he had. Here, the parents of the youth probably already guessed what he said. The other day he bought himself one more toy, treated his friends and came to me “at zero”. The scenario is quite common and familiar to all of us.
At that moment, I thought that is a standard pattern in the behaviour of the many. The stimulus and the reaction. Got money – spent them, got again – drained out. Especially, when the purchase does not take time to stand in line, you do it in one click, simplified as much as possible. Therefore, we see an increasing imbalance towards “spent” – it goes before “got” and instead of “zero”, we are already “in the red”. When you are 11, you know that tomorrow you might ask your parents for pocket money again. What about when you are 30?
I will call this the conditioned reflex to spend money. Nobody teaches us that. This is similar to our body’s natural response. And I’ve been watching these reactions in children since they learned to say, “I want ice cream. Give me money”. Our desires change over the years, but the reflex patterns don’t. And here I would say the main point.
The sooner a kid learns to save funds, accumulate and invest them wisely, the more natural those habits will become in adult life. This knowledge and skills will turn into new conditioned reflexes.
In fact, this is the idea, a mission, a goal, whatever you call it, of the game our team made up, of OTP Capitalism.
Great circle of money in nature.
If I ask you, what is money, what image first comes to mind? Cash, coins of a specific currency and a certain value. Have you thought about it in a way that it is one more misconception, which just prevents us in many ways to be financially independent and successful? A few more decades and banknotes may disappear, and the money, of course, will remain. Here we come to another important idea, which prompted us to develop a stock market game.
In fact, money is a system. These are actions and processes. This is an algorithm of debt obligations and debt repayment, expressed in material (today – banknotes).That is why financial literacy, which we talk about at every step, is not just to learn how to manage cash; it is to understand the mechanisms of the whole algorithm.
Our game was born at a time when we wanted to teach our children this circulation.
Game or the life?
OTP Capitalism has already become one of the hallmarks of OTP Capital among progressive educational institutions. School principals agree that it is important to teach children financial literacy. The discipline may affect their entire future, as they will learn not to feel scared to dig into economic processes, trying themselves as investors and be ready for turbulent times in the market. Warned is armed. Moreover, in our case, they will be armed with more than the theory and dictionary terms, which are often far from the reality.
During the game-imitation, children go through all possible scenarios that occur on the stock exchange in any condition. Non-payment of dividends and, conversely, – a
crazy rise in shares, the default and the initial public offering. On their own, with their virtual money, students in an hour and a half begin to understand the tools of investing and the difference between them: the levels of risk and their relationship to return.
As a result, long after the game, I hear different suggestions: “I should not have taken so many options!”; “It’s great that I did not reset all government bonds!”. After the game, we always leave them this space for the opportunity to express their own experiences and impressions on such important concepts as diversification, investment, assets and dividends.
It is at this point that we feel that the line is slowly blurring between the very game, having finished and is forgotten later, and the realities in which these children might
find themselves in a few years.
The trigger and the chance
Yes, our team doesn’t make a secret from it: the game is, first of all, a trigger. Today they were virtual investors. However, tomorrow they will go to practice, to grow their passive income, one of them might be our partner and investor at OTP Capital. Each financially literate child in Ukraine approach us few steps closer to the establishment of a strong and resistant middle class.
Secondly, our game is a chance. After all, for children far from stock market investments and the stock market, the game opens up new spaces and opportunities to try themselves in this field in the future. Each time we played the game, we made it a rule to reward the winners financially. For several games in a row, the first three winners actually become investors: we give them OTP Kids investment certificates, the first in Ukraine investment fund for children.
We do not reward with money. We are giving a start in the investment business. For all other participants, the game becomes a helping platform to decide: should I stay with the same spending reflex, or should I start saving little by little?
Draw you back to the story with my son. Does he spend pocket money? Certainly. Known games, gadgets, goodies. But. Today he is already a young investor. He has his own children’s investment certificates and is well aware of the importance of diversification. Even if he still comes to me to ask, “Mom, give me money”, in 15 years his accumulated funds will be working for him.
