Financial literacy in UK not very high – Uswitch survey

By Andrei Skvarsky.

A survey by British price comparison service Uswitch suggests that the average Briton is not too savvy about financial terminology with about one-fifth of the British failing to fully understand the term “pension” and about a quarter not being completely sure what “interest rate” means.

Investment jargon is a set of financial terms that give the British the biggest problems. For instance, only 64 per cent of respondents in the survey claimed to know for sure what “investing” meant.

“Pension” was understandably the least confusing term but still only 78 per cent claimed to know the exact meaning of the word.

“Interest rate” was the second-best understood term with 76 per cent being confident about what the phrase stood for.

Only 13 per cent claimed to know the precise meaning of “fintech” (“financial technology”) while 56 per cent were not even aware of the term, even though an EY survey had suggested that in 2019 three quarters of global consumers had used fintech services for money transfers or payments.

Uswitch questioned 3,972 Britons in the poll.

In another part of the survey, Uswitch studied average monthly numbers of Google searches in Britain for various financial terms.

“Cryptocurrency” was one of the least Googled-for terms, but, interestingly, Britain was the second-most interested country after the United States when it came to trying to find out “how to invest in cryptocurrency”.

British searches make up 12 per cent of global average monthly Googled attempts to find answers to that question.

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