"How many U.S. dollars can you buy with 1,000 won today?"
Earlier this month at the Museum of Korean Finance History in central Seoul's Jung-gu, a Shinhan Bank employee serving as a finance instructor posed the question, and students bent over worksheets listing hypothetical exchange rates for different countries. Moments later, one child shot a hand up and called out, "One dollar."
Twenty-four first- to third-grade elementary school students took part in the Shinhan Children's Finance Class that day. Working in teams of four, they carried out a range of finance missions over two hours. They learned currency units by looking at bills from different countries on display at the museum, and in a space recreating an old bank teller window, they opened their own passbooks to learn how saving and interest work.
The class was built around hands-on activity rather than lectures from the instructor. The children picked fictional companies to invest in and watched share prices rise and fall as new headlines appeared, learning how investing works. Each completed mission earned them "coins," and after class they could use the coins they had collected to pick out items to buy. Deciding whether to buy something right away or hold on to the coins was designed to let them feel the difference between spending and saving.
Shinhan Financial Group has run this children's finance education program since 2012. It has offered classes in various formats, not only for the children of employees at partner companies but also for children of military personnel and those in mountainous and island communities. A total of 25,675 children have gone through the Children's Finance Class to date.
Parents are keenly interested as well. Park Jung-yoon, 42, who visited that day with nine-year-old twins, said, "I thought children need exposure to finance from an early age, but it isn't easy to teach it systematically at home. I thought this was a good opportunity because they could learn by seeing and doing."
The teachers are all Shinhan Financial Group employees. So far, 1,231 employees have taken part as instructors for children's finance education, conveying the financial knowledge they built up on the job at a level children can grasp. Choi Jae-hyuk, a Shinhan Bank staffer who served as an instructor that day, said, "Interest among employees is high enough that I applied twice for the in-house instructor recruitment. Since we teach first-graders through sixth-graders together, it's important to explain difficult financial concepts at each child's level. After one class, I asked a child what finance is, and the answer was 'the flow of money.' That made me proud."
Education drawing on employee expertise is expanding into digital fields as well. In 2014, Shinhan Financial Group formed the Shinhan Tech Volunteer Corps with staff from its information technology divisions to run digital and artificial intelligence education. At a Children's AI Coding Class held last month, children assembled AI robots themselves and entered programs to make them move, learning how the technology works. Now in its third year, the AI coding class has drawn about 400 children so far.
Employees also take the lead in preventing financial fraud. To date, some 2,000 Shinhan Financial Group employees have visited schools, military units and senior centers to teach the main methods used in voice phishing and other financial scams, how to respond to them and how to conduct financial transactions safely. About 100,000 people have received the training across a total of 2,785 sessions.
The programs are also reaching adolescents and young adults. Career On visits vocational high schools in person to provide mock interviews, employment lectures and finance education to help students enter the workforce. The group also runs Career Next, which offers practice-oriented training to young adults seeking jobs in finance and IT. The focus is on providing what each stage of life requires: financial fundamentals for children, career and employment skills for adolescents and young adults, and fraud prevention education for older adults. A Shinhan Financial Group official said, "Having employees of a financial company go out into the field to provide finance and prevention education is meaningful because it returns the expertise our staff hold to society while also contributing to financial consumer protection."
