Financial awareness is high, yet many employees struggle to turn knowledge into meaningful action. Thomas Drury argues that workplace financial education needs a rethink, exploring how L&D teams can remove barriers, personalise support and connect learning to real financial decisions, while measuring success through behaviour change rather than course completion.
The case for workplace financial education has been made before, but it’s usually made the wrong way. The framing tends to be “people don’t know about ISAs, pensions or fraud risk, so we need to teach them.” That framing doesn’t survive contact with the actual UK data. FCA Financial Lives survey shows awareness of mainstream financial products is high. What’s much lower is the share of people who hold what they say they actually want.
It isn’t really an education problem; it’s a capability and friction problem
The gap between stated preference and actual behaviour is a more interesting place to start a conversation about workplace L&D, because it isn’t really an education problem; it’s a capability and friction problem. The workplace happens to be uniquely positioned to address it, much more so than the general-public channels such as consumer journalism, government campaigns, or retail-bank communications.
The UK retail-investing data, drawn from FCA Financial Lives 2024, HMRC ISA filings, and Action Fraud’s annual report, shows the contours clearly:
- 35% of UK adults hold investments — down from 37% in 2022
- 91% are aware of cryptocurrency; only 8% actually own any
- 72% say they want sustainable investments; only 18% currently hold them
- £649 million was lost to UK investment fraud in 2024 (66% crypto-related)
Read together, the numbers tell a consistent story: awareness is high, conversion to action is low, and the cost of inaction, or worse, action in the wrong place, is real and rising.
Why this is an L&D problem, not an information problem
For L&D and people teams, the data should reframe the conversation. The intuitive response of “let’s teach people about pensions, fraud, ISAs” is the kind of intervention that’s been tried for years. Awareness numbers tell us most people already have the basic information. What they’re missing is the friction-removed path to acting on it.
Compare this to other workplace learning challenges. We don’t run “what is leadership” courses for managers; we build coaching loops, decision frameworks, and feedback systems. Financial literacy training tends to revert to the older format of content delivery, awareness-raising, knowledge testing. Yet the underlying problem looks much more like a behavioural and structural one.
Awareness gap or friction gap?
If you’re designing financial literacy content, ask whether each module is closing an awareness gap or a friction gap. Most modules close awareness gaps. The 91%-vs-8% awareness-to-ownership figure on crypto suggests this is a category error in many syllabi.
Three things tend to close friction gaps in a workplace context:
- Decision frameworks, not facts
“How do I decide whether to switch from a default pension fund to a sustainable mandate” is more useful than “what is a sustainable fund” - Real decision moments
Pension reviews at scheme anniversaries, ISA decisions before tax-year end, salary-sacrifice elections. These are concrete points where a workplace can intervene with the right content at the right time - Connection to existing systems
Workplace L&D rarely has its own delivery problem: payroll, pension platforms, share-scheme administrators all touch employees regularly. Financial literacy training that integrates with these touchpoints reaches further than standalone modules
Where most programmes fall short
Three patterns explain why workplace financial literacy programmes have historically underperformed against the opportunity. None of them are about content quality.
- Generic provider, generic content
Most workplaces buy financial-wellbeing content from a small handful of providers, who deliver the same modules to every employer. The content rarely differs from public-facing financial education, which means it stops where the public-facing education already stops - No life-stage segmentation
A 28-year-old saving for a first home, a 45-year-old reviewing pension contributions ahead of a salary jump, and a 58-year-old approaching pension access need very different financial decisions. They’re typically offered the same syllabus - Disconnected from the moments that matter
An employee receives pension scheme communications, payroll messages, share-scheme paperwork, and benefits-window emails throughout the year. Financial literacy training is rarely sequenced around any of them. It runs in its own track, on its own calendar
Each of these is fixable. The first by tailoring content to the workforce’s actual demographic. The second by segmenting by life-stage, typically less work than HR teams expect because most pension and benefits platforms already hold the data needed to do it. The third by connecting financial literacy to the existing communication calendar rather than running it parallel.
Measuring it properly
A second test, and a harder one, is how is impact measured? Most financial-literacy programmes track completion. A meaningfully better measure is participation outcomes: did pension-scheme contribution rates change after the programme, did ISA take-up move, did fraud-report incidence drop in the year following?
The Action Fraud data on £649m in 2024 investment fraud losses, with 66% involving cryptocurrency scams, is a particularly stark measurement opportunity. Fraud reports are recordable; their downward movement is attributable. A workplace running fraud-awareness modules should be able to track whether incidence among its workforce shifts.
That’s not a soft outcome. It’s an auditable one. The same is true for pension contribution rates, sustainable-investing election rates, and ISA usage. The data is there to measure against; we just don’t usually wire L&D programmes up to use it.
The case for closing the gap
Workplace financial literacy training has been undervalued for two reasons. The first is that it’s been designed as awareness content when the underlying problem is friction. The second is that its outcomes have been measured against attendance and completion rather than against behaviour change visible in workforce data.
Both are addressable. The numbers point clearly at a category of training where workplaces have unusual leverage, a captive audience, regular touchpoints with relevant systems, trust relationship, that they aren’t fully using.
The case for closing that gap isn’t sentimental. It’s that the data, aggregated across the UK retail-investing population, says the cost of leaving the gap open keeps rising. L&D is one of the few places that’s actually positioned to do something about it.
Thomas Drury is Co-founder and Director of The Investors Centre
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