Learning about money should start as early as possible.
And now there's a financial course,
teaching thousands of high school students about the importance of credit.
One main financial is offering the course which is called Credit Worthy.
And earlier today, I spoke with the company's Ceo Doug
Schulman and three students who have received scholarships from the program.
Take a look.
One main,
our mission is to improve the financial well being of hard working Americans.
And we do that by offering credit,
offering insurance, offering a set of financial education to our customers.
But we also have 1400 branches across the US
and we're very focused on supporting the communities where we live and work.
And so we developed a program called Credit Worthy by One Main,
which is now in over 2500 high schools.
We've served over 100 and 50,000 students and we're basically giving them
uh financial literacy and financial education classes where they
can learn the basics of making a budget,
opening a savings account, getting a credit card, building your credit history,
getting a student loan, all the kinds of things you need.
When you launch from going, being in high school
to being an independent adult and then having a sound financial future.
Why is it important to start financial literacy early?
So that society and companies like you can benefit?
Yeah, I mean, look, I think it's less important that a company benefits.
It's more important that,
you know, look, we live in America
and it's a democracy with capitalism. And so you need to know how to manage your money
in order to be successful.
And there's a lot of studies that have shown that the earlier you start,
the more likely you are to get on solid financial footing going forward.
Um Over half of high school students
graduate without knowing the basics about credit.
And so understanding credit is super,
super important and really helps establish a great foundation to being
an independent adult,
to have a healthy and happy life and some financial security is part of that.
In addition to operating as the company
and building out these financial literacy courses,
it's my understanding, you're also providing scholarships to students
and we have some of those scholarship winners here today,
walk me through this scholarship,
how our viewers might be able to participate and one day even take it.
Yeah. So if you're in one of our high schools, um and you've taken the class,
um you can apply for a scholarship and it's a straightforward application.
These are three of our scholarship winners,
young women with a great future and hopefully we helped, um
you know,
give a little nudge and a little help and I've had a great
time hanging out on the New York Stock Exchange floor with them today.
Uh Ladies,
what does it feel like to be down here on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange?
It feels great. Honestly, I never expected that this essay could bring me
today here at the New York Stock Exchange and I wanna thank Mr
Sulman for inviting us here today.
Um It has been like a really good opportunity I've seen like, I've seen all this on TV,
so to see it in real life and
understand it more and like, know what I'm walking myself into
has been very, very like, you know,
like it feels like an upbringing and I look at like
I look forward to looking into it more as well.
Yeah, it's truly an honor to be here. I never expect it to be, you know, in
this um
space. Um And I just feel grateful to be here and,
you know, experiment
on an offer. I would be grateful.
Thank you.
Amazing ladies. I wanna ask you too with this scholarship. How are they you hoping
that it will help you improve your financial future down the road?
Ok. Well, I obviously got the scholarship and
I'm hoping to invest that money.
Um And obviously I wanna see how well that goes and being here,
it gives me hope that I will be able to invest and be successful with it.
Let's hear from the other ladies too in terms
of what you wanna use the scholarship for.
Well, I'm definitely serving the saving this money for college later on,
since I wanna become a licensed practical nurse
and I'll definitely be using this money for college
um, as a high school senior.
Now I'm like stepping into a new stone and going into college.
So I would like to use the money for things that I need in college, like textbooks and,
you know, other things that are important for the college experience
and it would just teach me how to save my money and manage it
and go on to the next step in college.
Doug, I have another question for you.
How do you manage and measure the effectiveness of this creditworthy program?
Yeah.
So when you take a course, you,
there's an exam you can take afterwards to see how you're doing.
We'll track scholarship and,
and stay in touch with our scholarship winners and see kind of,
you know,
how successful were they going into, um,
college, what kind of majors did they have? And, you know, we're in the early stages.
So we start with high school students.
Eventually, they'll be college students, eventually they'll be in the workforce.
And we'd love to,
um, hire some of them, you know,
as employees at one main where we have employees across the country.
So there's a variety of ways.
We hope to keep supporting these students going forward.
My final question to you is with interest rates at decades year highs.
How does that impact the business that you're doing?
And what does it mean for customers?
Yeah.
Um, look,
we try to make sure we work with customers for them to get an affordable loan,
an affordable credit card, an affordable car loan, affordable, um, insurance.
Um, we haven't had to raise our prices that much.
We've been able to work with customers.
We do some borrowing from the capital markets which um
you know, the cost of, of, of borrowing has gone up.
But luckily we've got one of the strongest balance
sheets in the business and we have a lot of
long term debt and so we have very little new borrowing that we have to do in any year.
So
like everyone else, it affects us.
Um Our real focus is working with our customers
and to the extent that inflation affected them.
A Hallmark of our company is being there for our customers in good times and bad.
Most of our customers are doing just fine, but inflation did pinch some of them
and those, you know, we're very committed to working with them.
We've got a bunch of tools to do so and
you know, our results uh compared to our competitors,
our credit results in this interest environment have been better than others.
So, um you know, we're lucky to have a,
a super talented team who's been able to
manage through this tricky economy very well.
All right.
Thanks again to Doug Shulman,
the CEO of one main financial and those incredible
young women and congrats to them on their scholarships.