Improving Financial Literacy and Supporting Financial Decisions: Developing a Personalized Configurator

Financial literacy is vital for individuals to understand their economic life cycles and make suitable financial decisions. Due to the increasing complexities, the available financial systems lack the capacity to better educate individuals to facilitate informed financial decision-making. In this study, we capitalize on the configuration principles for creating customized products and services and develop a personalized financial configurator, aiming to better educate individuals for their pension-related decision-making. The personalized financial configurator is developed based on a three-tier distributed system architecture and can generate diverse personalized outputs, e.g., future financial asset changes, future investment potentials for retirement, and recommendations. The outputs together with recommendations facilitate individuals to make informed pension-related decisions, e.g., suitable retirement ages and suitable investment strategies. Hence, the results demonstrated that the personalized financial configurator can better educate individuals by providing personalized data and information, thus facilitating their informed pension-related decision-making.