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For months, families have reported problems with the digital transition of Healthy Start, a government funded programme to support families on low incomes. As the cost of living crisis worsens, this is leading to avoidable hardship, write Margaret Anne Defeyter and colleagues

Financial literacy is a path to sustainability and has an important role in ensuring the financial sustainability of individuals, families, enterprises and national economies. The level of these economic indicators such as debt, payment discipline, savings and financial management all translate into prosperity or insolvency and bankruptcy and result partially from financial literacy. The higher the level of financial literacy, especially of young people, the more favourable the level of economic indicators, which translates into the economy and sustainable development. With this study we aim to determine the level of financial literacy of high school students in Poland and to determine whether financial literacy changes according to gender. The most important element that distinguishes our study from the others is that or study was carried out with a large sample of high school students with an average age of 15–16 years. In addition, the effect of gender on financial literacy at an early age was investigated, also comparing the wider themes to the so-called narrow themes. The results of the research demonstrated a good and partially very good, level of financial knowledge of the young people in Poland. 45.3% obtained an average level score and 43.8% achieved a high-level score in financial knowledge. This result shows that they can be rational in their financial decision making. However although, it is understood that gender makes a difference on financial behaviour and use of financial instruments, gender does not make any difference on the level of financial knowledge. Moreover, the financial literacy level of males is found to be higher than females.

•Gift givers prefer to give gift cards to luxury stores.•Gift recipients prefer to receive non-luxury gift cards as gifts.•Resellers demand and buyers pay lower prices for luxury gift cards.•Valuation of gift cards is mediated by their perceived utility as gifts. Gift cards account for a $200 billion market in the US, yet little is known about consumers’ preferences and valuations of different gift cards. We examine how average US consumers feel about exchanging luxury brand gift cards (LGCs) versus non-luxury brand gift cards (NLGCs). Using secondary data analyses, surveys, and experiments, we demonstrate two asymmetries: between valuations of LGCs versus NLGCs and between valuations of gift cards by givers versus recipients. We show that LGCs are valued less than NLGCs with identical price tags. LGCs are more likely to be swapped or sold. Resellers demand and buyers pay lower prices for LGCs. These effects are mediated by the perceived utility of the gift cards as gifts and moderated by a person’s role in the gifting process. Gift givers value and prefer to give LGCs more, whereas recipients prefer and value NLGCs more.

In 2012, we set out to recruit a cohort of at least 10,000 women aged 18-23 from across Australia. With recent research demonstrating the inadequacy of traditional approaches to recruiting women in this age group, we elected to conduct open recruiting. Our aim was to report on the overall success of open recruiting and to evaluate the relative success of a variety of recruitment methods in terms of numbers and demographics. We used referrals, Facebook, formal advertising, and incentives in order to recruit the cohort. In all, 17,069 women were recruited for the longitudinal online survey, from 54,685 initiated surveys. Of these women, most (69.94%, n=11,799) who joined the longitudinal cohort were recruited via Facebook, 12.72% (n=2145) via the fashion promotion, 7.02% (n=1184) by referral, 4.9% (n=831) via other Web activities, and 5.4% (n=910) via traditional media. Facebook was by far the most successful strategy, enrolling a cohort of women with a similar profile to the population of Australian women in terms of age, area of residence, and relationship status. Women recruited via fashion promotion were the least representative. All strategies underrepresented less educated women-a finding that is consistent with more traditional means of recruiting. In conclusion, flexibility in recruitment design, embracing new and traditional media, adopting a dynamic responsive approach, and monitoring the results of recruiting in terms of sample composition and number recruited led to the successful establishment of a new cohort.

Alternative financial services (AFS) have been studied in recent years in terms of how these financialmarkets are utilized. The products and services include check cashing, pawnshop loans, payday advanceloans, electronic cash transmissions, tax refund anticipation arrangements, rent-to-own contracts, prepaiddebit cards, gift cards, and loans collateralized by automobile titles. Cryptocurrency has become part ofthis AFS ecology. The 2023 Survey of Household Economics and Decisionmaking collected informationon AFS use, including the use of cryptocurrency as an AFS. This research answered the questions: a) Dousers of cryptocurrencies for AFS also tend to use them for investments; b) do users of cryptocurrencies tomake payments tend to use them for other AFS purposes, and c) do users of cryptocurrencies to sendmoney to friends and family tend to use them for other AFS purposes?

This article investigates the degree to which buyers choose to diversify their use of payment methods for in-person purchases. Some buyers use only one payment instrument. Others combine the use of mostly cash, credit, and debit cards, and a few paper checks and prepaid cards. To each survey respondent, I apply three concentration and inequality measures over the use of payment instruments. Results show that the average and median degree of consumers’ payment concentration only slightly decline with payment volume and exhibit almost no correlation with consumer demographics.

Recent research on human nonverbal vocalizations has led to considerable progress in our understanding of vocal communication of emotion. However, in contrast to studies of animal vocalizations, this research has focused mainly on the emotional interpretation of such signals. The repertoire of human nonverbal vocalizations as acoustic types, and the mapping between acoustic and emotional categories, thus remain underexplored. In a cross-linguistic naming task (Experiment 1), verbal categorization of 132 authentic (non-acted) human vocalizations by English-, Swedish- and Russian-speaking participants revealed the same major acoustic types: laugh, cry, scream, moan, and possibly roar and sigh. The association between call type and perceived emotion was systematic but non-redundant: listeners associated every call type with a limited, but in some cases relatively wide, range of emotions. The speed and consistency of naming the call type predicted the speed and consistency of inferring the caller’s emotion, suggesting that acoustic and emotional categorizations are closely related. However, participants preferred to name the call type before naming the emotion. Furthermore, nonverbal categorization of the same stimuli in a triad classification task (Experiment 2) was more compatible with classification by call type than by emotion, indicating the former’s greater perceptual salience. These results suggest that acoustic categorization may precede attribution of emotion, highlighting the need to distinguish between the overt form of nonverbal signals and their interpretation by the perceiver. Both within- and between-call acoustic variation can then be modeled explicitly, bringing research on human nonverbal vocalizations more in line with the work on animal communication.

Online shopping, already on a steady rise, was propelled even further with the advent of the COVID-19 pandemic. Of course, credit cards are a dominant way of doing business online. The credit card fraud detection problem has become relevant more than ever as the losses due to fraud accumulate. Most research on this topic takes an isolated, focused view of the problem, typically concentrating on tuning the data mining models. We noticed a significant gap between the academic research findings and the rightfully conservative businesses, which are careful when adopting new, especially black-box, models. In this paper, we took a broader perspective and considered this problem from both the academic and the business angle: we detected challenges in the fraud detection problem such as feature engineering and unbalanced datasets and distinguished between more and less lucrative areas to invest in when upgrading fraud detection systems. Our findings are based on the real-world data of CNP (card not present) fraud transactions, which are a dominant type of fraud transactions. Data were provided by our industrial partner, an international card-processing company. We tested different data mining models and approaches to the outlined challenges and compared them to their existing production systems to trace a cost-effective fraud detection system upgrade path.

PurposeThis study examines the relationship between prepaid debit card use and the intention to open a bank account within twelve months. The Transtheoretical Model (TTM) of Behavior Change helped to conceptualize one's stage in the process of changing from unbanked status if desired. The Theory of Planned Behavior (TPB) provided a framework to examine factors that influence banking intention. Prepaid debit card use is considered a social norm as it is a popular alternative to banking, and these accounts have increasingly mimicked bank account features in recent years.Design/methodology/approachThree in-depth focus group interviews with low-income respondents were first conducted in 2012, which revealed a prolific use of prepaid debit cards. Most participants had previous banking history, and despite negative experiences, some requested information about banking terms and “free” banking. These themes and previous studies informed a TPB-based biprobit model, which was estimated using data of an unbanked sample from 2013, 2015 and 2017 waves of the US Survey of Unbanked and Underbanked Households.FindingsThough there was banking interest in the focus groups, no significant empirical association was found between recent prepaid debit card use and banking intention. Going deeper with another sample, we found that current cardholders were equally likely to have become recently banked or to be long-term unbanked but less likely to be long-term banked. Also, factors such as a more recent relationship with banks, use of other alternative financial services for transactions and credit, smartphone ownership, and trust increase banking intention.Research limitations/implicationsThe main limitation of the study is the cross-section quantitative data. Future research may track banking status over time, particularly as financial technology (fintech) evolves with alternatives that may influence banks and customers to adapt.Practical implicationsTo compete with “leapfrog” fintech banking alternatives, bank managers should consider utilizing customer segmentation to target “at-risk” customers and former customers with products and terms tailored to meet their banking needs. Banks can also tailor digital products to capture markets in banking desserts through mobile phones.Originality/valueThis mixed-methods study is unique in that it builds on insights from earlier in-depth interviews with real unbanked groups to examine a trend in prepaid debit card use and the impact on banking interest.

Purpose Financial inclusion is measured by the number of people who use the formal financial system and banks in particular. Limited access to formal banking services and the existence of unbanked households is a main policy concern. The authors evaluate how the use of prepaid (reloadable) debit cards by unbanked households affects financial inclusion and specifically the potential for these households to participate in the formal financial system and open a bank account. Design/methodology/approach The authors apply matching models to analyze survey data from the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation National Survey of the Unbanked and Underbanked Households from 2009 to 2019 and evaluate how prepaid cards use affects plans to open a bank account. Findings Unbanked households who use prepaid cards are 5% less likely to open a bank account compared to the matched nonusers of prepaid cards. In addition, prepaid card users are 12% more likely to use nonbanks to transfer money/transact online and 18% more likely to have obtained loans from alternative financial services providers compared to the matched unbanked nonusers of prepaid debit cards. Originality/value No previous work has estimated the causal impact of use of prepaid cards on financial inclusion.