Research
Financial Literacy and its effect on improving consumer’s Financial well-being
Recent trends have shown surging credit card defaults, increasing delinquency, and fewer customers paying their overdraft fees on time. Policymakers being cognizant of this problem, have recommended financial education as the necessary cure, yet there is a long way to go before this gap can be filled. In this project, I work under professor Siddharth Bhattacharya who is an instructor for Data Analytics, where we address this issue by developing personalized financial literacy recommendations. We develop an algorithm that takes into account rich user profile information and provides personalized advice on which aspects of the user’s financial literacy to improve in order to increase the overall user’s financial well-being. Using CFPB’s annual survey data we show how consumers can improve their financial well-being (as reflected by improvement in their financial well-being scores) by following our candidate recommendations. I helped in the project with the insights that are generated through the analysis of this data. I applied some of the concepts I learned in the MIS2502 Data Analytics class to sharpen my skills further by helping on this real research project. We mainly used R programming to perform a detailed analysis of data and creating insightful results that will increase the financial well-being of people through the help of financial literacy. It is ongoing research and the final results for the research are yet to come.