Rahman Arian
Good afternoon, this is Rintaro, this is Sky and I am Arian. And today we will be speaking about how to bring investment to the masses. However, before all else, I would like to ask you a question. That question is “Is investment important?“

I would argue yes. Through investment, individuals are able to increase their wealth. This is more important in modern-day Japan because Japan had very low-interest rates, low wage growth, and a frankly unreliable pension system. It is up to us to ensure ourselves a comfortable life during our sunset years. Investment is a very effective way to accomplish this.

Moreover, the benefits of investment are not merely personal. You see, investment allows us to empower good ideas and reward them. If it were not for the investment, we would not be able to see great ideas such as the microchip and life-changing apps that we use on a daily basis come to flourishing. Investment is what brings innovation to our society.

That being said, we tend to see investment as something out of our realm. We tend to think that investment is only for professionals, especially in Japan. As a result, Japan has very low retail investor activity. Now I would like to bring my friend Sky to the stage to elaborate on this issue.

Tampol Cangas Sky
Thank you, Arian. Investment is low in Japan. Let's take a look at the actual numbers. These numbers are the possession rates of stocks and investment trusts. From the global comparison, we can see that Japanese people are less likely to hold stocks and investment trusts to invest their money.

Here we have two pie charts about the brokerage account holders by age group. The left one is the ratio of SBI's brokerage account holders by age group. SBI is the largest security firm in the domestic market. This chart shows that under 30 remains quite low at 8.5%. We can see the same trend in the other pie chart as well, which is about online brokerage accounts by age group, and under 30 is ONLY 5.9%.

This is more than enough to prove how young Japanese people are not into investment. What is problematic here from these slides is that young Japanese people are particularly unwilling investors even in the globally low-investing-minded Japanese population.

We think that this issue could be partly attributed to a lack of financial literacy in Japanese society.

Here are the average scores of financial literacy tests conducted by Central Council for Financial Services Information. Looking at the bar charts, it is too obvious that the youngest age group from 18 to 29 has the worst average scores, indicating that low financial literacy is most serious issue in the youngest generations.

Here's the follow-up survey of the same financial literacy tests. Actually, before the test was conducted, one group received financial education like how to manage money, basic accounting and financing. This chart shows that 67.3% of the participants said that financial education should be conducted after they actually experienced it. Also, it should be noted that out of those respondents, only 8.5% answered that they had received the same kind of financial education before.

In other words, a lot of Japanese people have never received financial education before, but after they learned what financial education was, they thought it was necessary for the Japanese curriculum.

We are going to suggest a practical application for financial education at Japanese high school. For that, we have three key components, education, technology, and investment. We came up with this application and named it "UPVEST" because the objective of this app is to educate the youth on investment to increase financial literacy in Japan.

This is a simulation application where students can practice investment. In the game, they start off with 100,000 points equaled to 100,000 JPY for the virtual market. Another game setting is that they compete with other algorithm-based investors in the virtual market. Lastly, the movement of stock markets is based on the real financial market, thus users naturally get up to speed on economic news, which is also good for financial literacy.

How to play the game is pretty straightforward. First, they investigate financial instruments, and make transactions. If they buy low and sell high, they can maximize their allocated points, their profits. Last but not least, what is also good about this app is transferability. The allocated points in the game can be transferred to actual JPY when students open their brokerage accounts once they turn 20.

We plan that the rate of transfer should be around 100 points equal to 1 actual JPY. Based on this calculation, if students keep their allocated points as they are from the beginning, they are going to have 1000 yen in their brokerage accounts when they open them.

Ishito Rintaro
How can we utilize this in the educational field? According to an educational guideline of high schools in 2022, investment education will be provided in the course of home economics from next year. As there have been few practical materials to learn about investment, this app plays an important role in bringing students actual investment experience in the future class of home economics.

In addition, it is said that over 90% of high school students possess smartphones and the GIGA school program aimed at providing each student with a digital device is now proceeding. Under these circumstances, students are allowed to work on this app even outside of their classrooms, having a lot of chances to be exposed to the investment world.

So, what benefits can we expect to our plan? First of all, contributing to the creation process of our educational material is a crucial marketing opportunity for brokerage companies to advertise their works especially among younger generations. As a consequence, there will be an increase in the number of young clients.

In addition, our investment app is expected to boost the financial literacy of young generations. Society will also be blessed with economic growth and clarified corporate governance attributed to the increase of investment.

In order to realize our plan, cooperation among these three elements is indispensable.

Brokerage companies take an initiative in creating a set of the app. Discussing with the ministry of education to what extent replicates the investment world in the app and demand from higher education, they form a foundation of the app.

Software engineers actually design the app based on the discussion between brokerage companies and the ministry of education. Production of the app is estimated to cost about 4 million yen in total.

The ministry of education invests in the creation of the app as digital learning material. After an accreditation by the ministry of education, it's time to introduce the app in the classroom, motivating more students to get familiar with the investment.

Rahman Arian
Finally, I want to end with one thought. And that is that investment is not just investment. The act of investment can be distilled into the act of synthesizing information to make smart decisions. It requires a special eye for good information and an equally effective action plan to make use of that information.

I see this as a transferable skill that more people should have especially in the information age. We are making children learn to program because so many of us think that it will be a useful skill for children. What makes investment so different? Let us invest in the future of children and society through investment.

Thank you for your attention.