Speaker 1:
From the library of the New York Stock Exchange at the corner of Wall and Broad Streets in New York City, you're Inside the ICE House, our podcast from Intercontinental Exchange on markets, leadership and vision in global business. The dream drivers that have made the NYSE an indispensable institution of global growth for over 225 years. Each week, we feature stories of those who hatch plans, create jobs and harness the engine of capitalism, right here, right now at the NYSE and at ICE's exchanges and clearing houses around the world. And now welcome Inside the ICE House.
Pete Asch:
In 2002, Alan Greenspan, then chairman of the Federal Reserve System, addressed the US Senate on the need to raise the financial literacy of the nation. In his speech, he says something that resonates today more than ever and I quote, "As market forces continue to expand the range of providers of financial services, consumers will have more choice and flexibility in how they manage their financial matters. They'll need to accumulate the appropriate knowledge about how to use new technologies and how to make financial decisions in an informed matter."
Pete Asch:
Two decades after that speech, those technologies are driving the biggest market stories happening today, from crypto to the democratization of trading. Access to these tools and investments combined with the pandemic led millions of Americans to start putting their money to work. Increased market participation while a net positive, was not without some growing pains. For example, the reporting around GameStop revealed a lack of understanding of market structure and the risks surrounding options, order flow, liquidity, clearing and settlement.
Pete Asch:
Our guest, EVERFI co-founder Ray Martinez is joining us today to talk about financial literacy month and how the company he co-founded has the mission to arm the world with, to use Greenspan's word, "the appropriate knowledge to make financial decisions." For full disclosure, EVERFI is ICE's partner on the NYSE Future Investors Program that equips students with an understanding of how the markets work and give them the confidence to participate in it. Students blend concepts with investing topics to learn how government, corporations and individuals come together to participate in the financial marketplace. Our conversation with Ray Martinez on financial literacy, how EVERFI is filling the missing layer in US education and teaching the tough issues is coming up after the commercial.
Speaker 3:
Whether it's markets, exchanges or networks, connection makes everything possible. The connection between data and technology, innovation and expertise and most of all, between people and opportunity. For over 20 years, ICE has transformed markets, products and processes to make things work better, faster, smarter. From modernizing energy and commodity trading, to revolutionizing the bond markets. Whether it's the world's largest stock exchange or the dream of home ownership, we do more than see the big picture, we create it. You may not know our name but we bet you know our network. ICE, make the connection.
Pete Asch:
Our guest today, Ray Martinez is co-founder and president of EVERFI. He leads the company's financial education and conduct and culture business units. Since 2008, he has helped EVERFI power educational programs that have brought critical skills to more than 30 million learners in 20,000 schools. Ray, welcome Inside the ICE House and thanks for joining us.
Ray Martinez:
Thank you for having me.
Pete Asch:
I'm here in Jersey, I believe you're in Massachusetts. It's a rainy April day but in many ways, probably the most exciting month for EVERFI, I would imagine.
Ray Martinez:
It's an incredibly exciting month. Financial literacy month was started back in 2004. The US Congress passed a resolution and this was through the great work of two national nonprofits that still exist today, the National Endowment of Financial Education and the Jumpstart Coalition. And since then, this topic of financial education, financial literacy has never been more important per year introduction with what's happened with GameStop. You look at the racial wealth gaps that exist in this country and then really globally, if you look at financial literacy surveys that have been conducted out of George Washington Universities, the need to really democratize this information has never been more important.
Pete Asch:
Let's go back to about a year ago with the pandemic going, what were your thoughts as you're hearing about these millions of dollars being poured into the financial system? Was this a watershed moment for you? Or did that make you really nervous?
Ray Martinez:
We can go back to 2008 when Tom Davidson, our CEO and Jon Chapman, our co-founder, started the company. I think it was very clear when you looked at what happened following the financial recession back in 2008 that you had a lot of young adults that are entering the workforce, entering college, that just were not equipped with the right information as it related to understanding the importance of your credit score, the concepts around compounding interest, understanding the markets and how the markets work, all the way over to the basics of investing. And you look at what happened with GameStop, that really comes down to folks placing a lot of bets and did not weigh the risk. It was all kind of reward based and goes back to understanding diversification, having goals, being patient.
Ray Martinez:
Our whole goal is how could you really leverage technology? How could you leverage best in class learning to educate every student, every family, regardless of where they live in this country? Most of what had been done in this space for a number of years was really great work, where there was a lot of paper based instruction, volunteer activities in the classroom but we thought that there was a different way to do that and that was to leverage scale and technology in a really robust platform to not only provide this information but to really measure outcomes. Because at the end of the day, having this knowledge in a vacuum is one step but how you apply that in your day to day life is really important.
Ray Martinez:
And you'll hear many terms throughout financial literacy month. You'll hear the term financial literacy, you'll hear the term financial capability, you'll hear the term financial wellness. And there are some differences between those terms. Financial literacy is just the ability to use financial knowledge and skills to manage financial resources. Financial capability is really taking that knowledge and skills but also having access and engagement with finance institutions, products, services in the markets. And then financial wellness is really being able to be financially secure and have financial freedom and that's controlling your day to day expenses, being able to absorb financial shock, which many families in this country are unable to do, to track and meet your or financial goals and to make choices so you can enjoy life.
Pete Asch:
Let's start with that knowledge aspect. I mentioned the speech that Greenspan gave to the Senate. The New York Times published an article recently that EVERFI shared on Twitter that showed that I think half the states in this country right now are either reviewing or possibly going to be introducing bills to mandate or increase financial literacy education. What is driving that interest right now? And do they go far enough? Or are we just getting started on how much we need that infrastructure?
Ray Martinez:
When we started the company in 2008, the first year was really spent building out our first online learning platform focused on high school students. And when we looked across the landscape at that point, there was only three states that had any type of requirement, Utah and Tennessee were two of the forward leaning states on this to topic area. And you're right, if you look at the standards that exist today, there are about 45 states that have some type of either standalone personal finance requirement or they'll have recommended learning standards where topics around savings or budgeting or diversification might be built into a history course or a career and technical education course but what we've created Pete, is you've really created these unfunded mandates for school districts and teachers. And I think one of the ways to fill that gap is to have the private sector really step in and provide really valuable resources to students and teachers.
Ray Martinez:
It's very difficult I think for teachers that might be teaching language arts or maths that aren't experts in a lot of these topics. And this is in many cases, an uncomfortable topic to educate students on because you'll have your own personal experiences. And so what we wanted to do is to create a web based solution that would really allow a student to have their own individualized learning experience, where you could bring the latest and greatest in Web 2.0 design and create these virtual financial playing fields that students could explore.
Ray Martinez:
But to your question, have we gone far enough? I don't think so. I think there should be a requirement in all 50 states. I think, as you think about student loans or buying your first car, buying your first home, we now have the ability with technology to provide relevant and timely information as you're making really critical and important life decisions. And when you start surveying young adults, this is information that they want. And we often refer to it as the missing layer in education.
Ray Martinez:
And I think one of the things that the pandemic has, I think forced many school districts in this country to do is to really reimagine what education should look like moving forward. The more and more we can incorporate practical everyday life skills into the curriculum of our school systems across the country, I think we can prepare the next generation for success. I think many of us, I'm included in this bucket, I don't know about your personal story, but I learned by making mistakes and these mistakes can be very costly, particularly for low to moderate income students in this country, under resourced families in this country. We think it's a critical part of the discussion, the education discussion in this country.
Pete Asch:
Not to focus on your mistakes but I understand that for you, this was a calling that began way back when you were not even in college, you were a 16 or 17 year old kid and you were presented to fill out the FAFSA, which for those who are not familiar is the Free Application for Federal Student Aid, which I have to say, I filled out myself and had no idea what it stood for right back when I was in college. How did that experience go? And how did that start to really get the thinking of where this missing layer was coming from?
Ray Martinez:
I grew up an hour outside of Boston Massachusetts, I'm still a diehard Red Sox and Patriots and Bruins and Celtics fan, in a small town called Spencer, Massachusetts. Middle income town, low middle class town and just a really awesome place to grow up. And I had incredibly supportive parents. My parents had me at a really young age. My mom was 16 and a half, my dad was 17. Neither of my grandfathers had a high school education or went to college and I was the first person in my immediate family to graduate from college, from Bowdoin College in Maine. And that experience, that education has unlocked so many opportunities for me and it's where I met Jon, it's where I met Tom and where EVERFI was really formed. But getting into college was such a highlight. Getting into Bowdoin and Hamilton and series of other schools.
Ray Martinez:
But very quickly I think reality set in which was how are we going to pay for this? My dad and I sat down at the dinner table. I'll never forget it. And we filled out the FAFSA form together and it was a really frustrating process but a very informative process. Because I had a understanding that I was taking out loans, that I was going to owe money when I left Bowdoin and I was fortunate and my sister was fortunate as well. My sister went on to law school at BC and got a wonderful education but this is typically not the dinner table conversation that many young adults and many families are having in this country today. And one of the things that we did when our first course was built, our first online web based high school curriculum, like any great entrepreneurs, we jumped in an RV and we took this technology and we drove it into the front door of classrooms all across the United States.
Ray Martinez:
It was important to us that we really started in schools and communities that were under resourced, where this would be the last piece of technology that somebody would walk in the front door where the message was, we just want you to use it. There's no cost to you, to the school, to the taxpayers. We just want to make sure that enough students have this information before they leave high school. And I spent a lot of time in the Black Belt counties in Alabama, the Mississippi Delta, Louisiana, Native American reservations in Southeastern Utah, my hometown high school in Spencer still uses the course.
Ray Martinez:
In those first conversations, Pete, with principals and superintendents and teachers I think has fueled a lot of our strategy in terms of how we continue to grow, how we continue to provide value and those first conversations were, "Listen Ray, yes, high school financial literacy, we will take that. But what do you have for my teachers? What do you have for my parents? What do you have for a lot of these other topic areas that are putting a ton of pressure on my kids around how to use the internet responsibly, how they think about careers, how we think about mental wellness and other topic areas that are just clearly underfunded as teachers are doing a heroic job in classrooms throughout the world?"
Ray Martinez:
And it gave me personally such a deep appreciation for how amazing this country is. We have a lot of faith and hope in our teachers. We have a lot of faith and hope in our educational system. I think our schools and our teachers need more support. And one of the things that we created was a really unique business model where all of our K through 12 platforms are free to public schools. There's no charge to the taxpayers. It's not a bait and switch it as many of our early conversations where people are like, "This is too good to be true. Are you going to send me a bill for your travel or for your airfare?"
Ray Martinez:
But no, our model is free to the school and that there's another funder of that software. And that's generally a third party payer. It could be a bank, it could be a credit union. It could be a large financial services company. It could be a foundation who covers the cost of those licenses. And that has allowed us to scale. We did not want to go direct to school districts. There's no way I would've went to David Prouty High School and asked them to pay for this. There was another way to do that.
Pete Asch:
Where did the expertise in the technology you come from? How did you build the platform that now today is helping so many people?
Ray Martinez:
What was important to us when we built out the first course, Pete, was that the software needed to do a couple things. Number one, it really needed to resonate with young adults. I think young adults in this country have a really high bar for how they receive content and how the education should be designed. The platform really is multisensory. It caters to lots of different learning styles. The student is in control of the learning, where there are different pathways. There's 3D gaming, there's animations built into the platform. And then we really wanted to, for our education community, for our teachers, our principals, our state superintendents, departments of education, we wanted to provide robust reporting where you would have pre-assessments, you would have post-assessments built in, there'd be attitude and behavioral surveys built into the platform so you can not only measure scale but you could really measure outcomes as students were moving through the course and then ultimately they would get certified.
Ray Martinez:
Today, we have a staff of over a 100 subject matter experts and structural designers, UI, UX experts who are building all of our courses, to be able to make adjustments to find out where are students falling off? Where are they getting hung up as they're moving through these different simulations? We have such a diverse set of learners in classrooms throughout the country and we wanted to make sure that it would cater to a diverse set of students. And one of the first communities that we launched in Pete, God, 10 years ago now I had the pleasure of going out to Utah and leading a teacher training at Salt Lake City Community College. As I mentioned earlier, Utah was one of the first states to actually pass a standalone personal finance requirement. And they had read an article about these three gentlemen from Bowdoin traveling around in an RV with a financial literacy program.
Ray Martinez:
And I'll never forget it. I finished my training and I had a teacher from Montezuma Creek, Utah come up to me after the training, Sandra Capitan, she was a personal finance teacher at Whitehorse High School in Montezuma Creek. And a 100% of her students are Navajo. And she said to me, she said, "Ray, I'm going to use this with my students but what I want to do and I what I want you to do is I want you to survey them at the end and if my students find this valuable and if they find it relevant, then I promise you I will use it. And we'll scale this out to other high schools in San Juan County."
Ray Martinez:
And I was so nervous when I sent the SurveyMonkey. We weren't that sophisticated at the time, it was a SurveyMonkey at the end of the course and a 100% of the students that took the program said, "This should be a requirement." And they all said, "This is something that my parents need, that my siblings need, that my grandparents need." And that was a really important, I think, validation of our software over 10 years ago.
Pete Asch:
I want to get back to EVERFI's story in a second but just to kind of a sidebar, you mentioned that you weren't that sophisticated in 2008 in the financial crisis but you're really operating in an educational environment that everyone else didn't get to until 2020. And so do you have a sense that a lot of your clients were able to use the learnings from working with you when it came time in 2020 to go fully remote?
Ray Martinez:
Nobody was prepared for what we've been through as a country over the last 14, 15 months. We had a lot of very large school districts, some of the largest school districts in the country approach our team. And we have a schools team as we call them, it's a 150 plus just incredible educators who taught in the classroom, former Teach for America graduates who really understand the pressures of being a teacher in this environment. But nobody was prepared for fully remote learning so a lot of these districts approached us and approached our team to really just help them consult on some of the best practices that we were seeing across the country.
Ray Martinez:
And you're right, one of the, I think the interesting perspectives that we have because we're working with 30,000 public schools, 8,000 school districts across the country, we're able to really glean some best practices and really just help. Whether it's integrating our software or other providers. And then you also would see in the workplace, I think much more of a need to invest in meaningful kind of internal employee training that leverages a lot of the best practices to online instruction.
Pete Asch:
You're talking about the breadth of how many people you help now but it all starts with one. And I was listening to a podcast you did with the Wharton Business School. You mentioned that sort of personal connection that got you that first sponsorship with a Massachusetts community bank. What was this unique sponsorship idea that you came up with? And was it that community bank or was it later your first major bank with BB&T, which is now Truist Financial?
Ray Martinez:
I think you had and continue to have really these kind of four major kind of macro things that are happening. Number one is more and more states were ultimately going to require or have recommended standards around financial education. You had under resourced schools, under resourced teachers that really couldn't invest in the R and D necessary to educate our students the right way. Number two, you had this kind of growing racial wealth gap that exists in this country that has really remained unchanged since the seventies. And then globally, when you started looking at the research that was coming out of George Washington University and the great work that Professor Annamaria Lusardi has done over the last few years where they conduct a global survey, it's a 150,000 respondents in over a 140 countries. They survey, it's the same four topics every year, it's diversification, inflation, compounding interest and then numerical proficiency and only 33% of adults worldwide were proficient or financially literate in these topics.
Ray Martinez:
And then you had this kind of growing consumer sentiment where consumers were expecting and I think demanding a lot more from their financial institution outside of just products and services. And then you had the regulatory environment and this gets back to kind of some of our first sponsors that we brought on board and this is part of Tom Davidson, our CEO, his vision and just his incredible leadership for the company. You also had the Community Reinvestment Act, which started in 1977 to really prevent redlining and discrimination in under resourced communities. As part of the Community Reinvestment Act, banks are required to provide investments and loans and services to low to moderate income communities. For schools that definition of low to moderate income is based off of 51% of the student body qualifying for free and reduced lunch. Under the kind of services umbrella, financial education was a qualified service and sometimes an investment.
Ray Martinez:
Actually CRA, Community Reinvestment Act is going under some modernization right now, as we think about the emergence of FinTechs and crypto and a lot of these new topic areas. And so some of our first banks had an interest in what we were doing at the time because it was really unique. It was embracing technology, it was embracing scale, it was embracing measurement and outcome. One of the first banks in the country was my hometown bank. I think they took some pity on me as a young entrepreneur that didn't really know what he was doing. And I think the only reason why they decided to do it because the VP of marketing at the time was my fourth grade soccer coach and we went undefeated in fourth grade. They ended up sponsoring my high school in a few other high schools.
Ray Martinez:
And then for BB&T at the time, now Truist, we had an opportunity to get an audience with Kelly King, their CEO and along with Bill Rogers at Truist today, that was such a huge deal for us, Pete. We were probably two years in, almost two and a half years into the business and while we had a lot of schools that were using the software, we didn't have anybody paying for it. When we got in front of Kelly and the executive team at BB&T, we finished our presentation. We were so nervous because there was a lot riding on this. I don't think we had made payroll for six months. We had literally maxed out all of our credit cards. We couldn't take a plane flight anywhere. We couldn't get a hotel room so we would drive everywhere. If it was within 10, 12 hours of our office, we were driving there because we just didn't have the money. And when we get done the presentation, they had approved the sponsorship.
Ray Martinez:
And that was really significant to allow us to keep our doors open but I also think it proved to ourselves that this could be very meaningful for everyone. For the communities that we serve and for financial institutions. And that pilot was incredibly successful, incredibly successful. And now today, if you look at Truist, the program has reached over a million students, it's in over 15 states across their footprint. They provide this software and this learning to their customers and to their consumers.
Ray Martinez:
And we're also embarking on some really unique other topic areas, one around early literacy instruction, which has been a passion of Jon and I's for many years, dating back to our days at Kaplan, where we provided a lot of early reading instruction to students. But one of the barriers around early reading instruction, if you are a student that's struggling with your phonic sounds or your long vowel sounds or your sight words or your comprehension, oftentimes to get extra help costs money. And we are taking again, we're taking that off the table. And in partnership with Truist, we've developed a really fascinating early reading program called WORD Force that will be made available to every student and every family in this country.
Pete Asch:
After this short break, Ray Martinez, co-founder and president of EVERFI and I discuss how his work growing that EVERFI's K to 12 offering has led the company to expand its resources to the entire population that we were just speaking about and how EVERFI is now using its full complement of tools to educate on tough topics around race and inequality, right after this.
Speaker 5:
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Pete Asch:
Welcome back. Before the break, Ray Martinez, co-founder and president of EVERFI and I were discussing financial literacy month and how EVERFI started. Before the break, we were talking a little bit about how you began to work with banks, not just to help the students in the area but also their own customers. How does that work? How do you incorporate your core educational programming for bank customers?
Ray Martinez:
Yeah, it's a great question, Pete and as I was mentioning earlier, I think more and more customers or consumers or members of credit union are really looking to these institutions to provide more value instead of selling a product or going right to a loan. Being able to provide some semblance of education, having a foundational understanding of some of these different topic areas. One of our first partners in this journey was Regions Bank and they wanted to provide some meaningful education to their adult population. We had been doing some work together in Atlanta public schools on the high school side. And we've created today a really unique library and platform of over 65 different modules that cover everything from home ownership, to how the markets work, to how you save, how you budget, the importance of your credit score.
Ray Martinez:
It's different in terms of the design because in the classroom setting you have a captive audience. Whether students like it or not, this is going to be part of an embedded curriculum and they need to complete the learning. For adult, you have them at a moment in time. And so we've created these modules to be relevant, to be timely and to be short bursts of information. These are two to five minute simulations that are available in English and Spanish and a bank or credit union or insurance company can take this platform and serve it up to different individuals based off of where they are in their own financial journey. It's probably been over the last three to four years I think one of the faster growing areas of our education company, not only in terms of providing this to consumers but also being able to provide this to small business and other banking clients.
Ray Martinez:
When you look at a lot of the surveys of CHROs, chief human resources officers, across the country, financial wellness continues to be this topic area that is right up with conduct and culture, sexual harassment prevention training, managing unconscious bias, mental wellness and financial wellness. You see all these topic areas coming together but instead of going and charging a small business or even a large business, I think a lot of our financial institutions are saying, "This is a great way to add value to our brand in terms of who we stand for." Similar to kind of the sponsorship of this software in schools, you're starting to see this emergence of sponsoring a lot of this adult consumer facing content like Third Bank in Cincinnati who's done a great job with this and others. And if you can start to influence the dinner table conversation over time, that becomes a very powerful place to be.
Pete Asch:
One thing I came across in preparing for this is that, oh, there's a weird problem with the American public where financial literacy, there's a sense of false confidence. Most Americans think they know more than they actually do and that's a unique problem. How do you make sure to serve up the content that people don't even know that they don't know?
Ray Martinez:
I think we're surprised as we've gone through and provided the adult financial education content, not only to consumers but to the employees of these financial institutions. And we've had a lot of folks come up to us and be like, "This just needs to also be a requirement for our employees as they're interacting day to day with customers and consumers." But I think one of the things that we don't want to do is we don't preach in our courses. We don't give advice in our courses. We want to be able to explain how this stuff works in a way that is relevant and in a way you can take and you can apply it how you want to in your day to day life. We're also able to, as you look at the kind of the adult, the consumer facing platform, it was also important that this really looks and feels like our partner's brand.
Ray Martinez:
Everything that we do is private labeled. I think we're by far one of the biggest education companies in the country that really not a lot of people know about because we really just want to be the intel inside that's delivering the learning, delivering the technology, delivering the outcomes but really allow our partners, whether it's a foundation or a credit union, an insurance company, allow our partners to take their value, their brand, their employee base and wrap themselves around the technology. It's important I think for more and more of our financial institutions to know that this content is provided by a trusted third party.
Ray Martinez:
We want this also to be a kind of reporting and regulatory layer where if a bank is going to invest in EVERFI, we want to be able to make sure that we're not only providing the technology and the infrastructure but their reporting that they can use for their board, for their regulators and for their own employees. And it becomes a real source of pride for a lot of institutions and their employees when they know that they're providing this information to the communities in which they live and work.
Pete Asch:
Speaking of reporting, you had mentioned that you also provide resources to help employees educate employees on productive workplace environments. I believe that all falls under the conduct and culture business part of EVERFI. How did that start? And how did you decide that you wanted to go from just financial literacy into helping kind of a widespread of compliance training solutions?
Ray Martinez:
Yeah. I think it came from a few different things. I think our vision as we were continuing to grow was, how could we really help our partners with both their kind of external investments in the community? And as we were doing that and I think as we were learning, we also were approached with, hey, we want to reimagine some of our internal training and we like the approach that you're taking with a lot of your software programs. We had spent the better part of eight years, nine years doing a lot of work on higher ed campuses across the country, work with about 1,500 colleges and universities on Title IX compliance around sexual violence prevention on college campuses, as well as alcohol and drug safety. And these are required courses for a lot of students.
Ray Martinez:
We had been doing it for a while. And we brought in some leading experts, Elizabeth Bille, who is our senior director of prevention, worked at the EEOC, worked at SHRM for a number of years. And then Jesse Bridges is our chief diversity officer and we thought that there was a new way to really just go beyond compliance and really think about prevention and bystander intervention and other best practices that could exist in workplace training. And so there are a couple broad categories that we cover, sexual harassment prevention training in the work place, managing unconscious bias in the workplace, as well as mental wellness training, mental wellness basics in the workplace. And it allows us now to have, I think really holistic conversations with our partners. We work with of over 900 financial institutions across the globe today, as well as about 400 other corporate partners.
Pete Asch:
How does that business model work? When you're working with a new bank per se, do you offer to provide the K to 12 and then add on? Or is this all part of one sort of suite of offering?
Ray Martinez:
Yeah, it's a part of one suite. What's a lot of fun now though when 13 years ago, if we had one person in the room to take a meeting with us, we'd be excited. And I think now when we walk in, it's a lot of fun because these topics are elevated in terms of board reporting and other investments that corporations are trying to make in the community. And it's now we walk in and it's, you've got the CEO, you've got the head of human resources, you've got the head of retail, you've got the chief marketing officer. You may have the head of the foundation or the head of corporate social responsibility in that room. And it just leads to a very dynamic conversation. And as we're listening, we'll map out a plan but these are longterm relationships.
Ray Martinez:
Our relationship with BB&T is going on 12 years. A lot of our customers are going on 10 years and we've made a lot of mistake along the way. But I think one of the things that I think we've done a really good job of is we've done a good job of listening. And I think we've done a good job of reacting and making these programs real with real meaning and real value. If you look at the network today, over 41% of our students are low to moderate income. 42% of our students are our BIPOC. And that is important work that wasn't built overnight. We did not just say, "Hey, go find the technology. It's here and it's free." We made a decision and a really important decision.
Ray Martinez:
And I'll never forget being in our old office. We called it the red brick schoolhouse in Georgetown. Tom worked in the kitchen, Chappy worked down in the den, I worked upstairs, but it was probably 400 square feet and we packed about 13 people in this office. There were rats in the back. It was a pretty interesting place to be but I'll never forget being with Jon, looking at a map of the United States as we were first launching. And it was very clear to us that you could not operate a education technology company from DC, that you needed to have kind of local leaders on the ground.
Ray Martinez:
And we've invested in this infrastructure where we have people all over the country now in different countries, Canada, the UK and other markets who work hand in hand every day with community based organizations, with departments of education, with universities, all the way down to the classroom level, to make this real, to make this meaningful. It's a real infrastructure and I think if there's one thing that I'm proud of is I'm really proud of that infrastructure. It's like we've never gotten off the RV. It just continues.
Pete Asch:
I want to key on that infrastructure word. I think technology can be a great equalizer as we've been discussing but it does require infrastructure and that's a major conversation in the country right now. I know that you have some experience working with Puerto Rico's recovery from Hurricane Marie. What is infrastructure in the modern world? What is infrastructure you need? Is it people? Is it communications lines, the technology? Is it roads? What is the infrastructure that this country's going to need?
Ray Martinez:
If could speak for students and school districts and teachers and families, it should be a given, it should be a right in this country that every student, every family regardless of where they live has access to high speed and reliable internet. That is a given and a must that they have access to technology to allow them to be successful in the modern age. That there's food security and healthy options for students. And there's a great company in Las Vegas called Green Our Planet that just does some great work in low to moderate income communities around hydroponics and healthy eating and vertical farming and other things that could be done in communities. And I saw a lot of this when I visited Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria, a lot of the interesting things that they're doing. We have to go just beyond just the knowledge and the delivery of the information.
Ray Martinez:
I'm a firm believer that we have to really start thinking about equity as it relates to access. Access to savings accounts, access to college savings accounts, access to mentors, access to how you navigate college, access to how you apply for a job. That to me is the next move for us as an organization. And all the academic research that we've done, all the outside academic research, really points to a lot of this kind of access, true access being a key piece. Senator Booker has talked for many years about IDAs, individual development accounts at birth for students, low to moderate income students and what that could mean for that family, what it could mean for that child when they graduate from high school and just starting your journey, starting your financial journey not so far behind but with support systems around you.
Pete Asch:
As we think about support systems surrounding, we're in a very unique moment in history, as you mentioned earlier about sort of mental wellness, things like that but as teachers reintegrate students into the classroom, which is happening now in the spring and even more in the coming fall, you've launched a couple of programs to assist in that. Can you have a sense of how those programs are going?
Ray Martinez:
We had conducted several surveys over the last year plus of our teachers and one of the surveys that we did spanned about 20 states, it was close to a 1,000 teachers that filled out the survey so pretty good sample size. And said, we just asked a question of, "What are some of the tools and topic areas that are important to you that you need or that your students need?" And the number one thing that came out of that survey was mental health training, mental wellness training and teachers being really worried about the effects of social media on their students, along with financial education.
Ray Martinez:
Pete, one of the things that we've done is we made a pretty significant investment in building out the next generation of our online courses and materials that would be made available to students and teachers for free all across the country, starting with a course that we built in partnership with Jeff Wiener around compassion and how you teach compassion at an early age and then scaling that up to mental wellness basics for high school students, prescription drug safety, anti-vaping education for students. All the way over to, and you'll be seeing it over the next couple months, healthcare literacy instruction, how we train the next generation of great data scientists to have careers, to be the next Pete or to be the next leader at ICE or the New York Stock Exchange and how you take data science and apply it in your everyday life. We think that these are some of the steps that we can take to help and support our school districts, our state departments of education, really reimagine instruction that students need to be successful.
Pete Asch:
As we wrap up, I want to talk about another significant investment that EVERFI recently announced that you marked a $100 million for curriculum that pushes for social change. What are you working with? And how are you partnering with organizations like the NFL and the United Negro College Fund to help, as you've been saying, close that racial wealth gap?
Ray Martinez:
We wanted to do our part, which was, how can you start building the next generation of this missing layer in education? And how can you go partner with some of the forward leaning corporate brands, some of the forward leaning foundations that exist in this country? And so with the NFL, we've launched a really signature initiative around character education and character building. You'll actually see some of our students at the NFL draft. I believe they're going to be introducing the third pick in the NFL draft. Those will be some EVERFI certified students. And looking at really incredible nonprofits like the United Way and Boys and Girls Clubs to be a resource and to help a lot of the nonprofits that exist in the country, support their work and their effort.
Ray Martinez:
And as I mentioned earlier, we want to sit in the background. We want just our technology to live in a way that is ubiquitous and in a way that can really be multichannel, at home, in the classroom, at the workplace, through a nonprofit that's doing incredible community work. That is what we've set out to do and then to measure those outcomes over time. We just finished a two year independent study looking at the efficacy of our middle school financial education program partnership with MassMutual and the MassMutual Foundation. Those results were very encouraging where the research concluded that the intervention, the online learning was effective for students regardless of race, socioeconomic background, parent education level and gender, which is just really positive finding. This is 6,000 middle schools, two million students that have been impacted.
Ray Martinez:
We're now going to embark on a five year longitudinal study, looking at the kind of longterm attitude, behavior and outcomes of providing this type of information. We've got an incredible research team head up by Dr. Dan Zapp and Meg Moyer who are leading some of this work. We really want to do and look at and examine, Pete, what happens over time as you compound this impact year over year, decade over decade? Are we moving the needle? And I think the sign points to we are moving the needle but we have a lot more work to do.
Pete Asch:
A lot of work to do but it always starts as step one. And so that kind of takes us back to where we started. We're in April, we're in financial literacy month, what is EVERFI doing this month to grab the attention of potential partners but also just the general population at large?
Ray Martinez:
Number one, we announced our research findings, which I think was a really big first step. The commitment that Dennis Duquette, the president of the MassMutual Foundation and Roger Crandall, the CEO of MassMutual have made, this is a 10 year commitment they have made to this topic of financial education at the middle school level. And the reason why middle school is so critical is that students are going through what's called financial socialization, where they are starting to develop their norms and their values and their attitudes around money and they can understand more complex economic topics. And there was a massive gap in the curriculum in the United States around this topic area. We thought it was important that we shared those findings.
Ray Martinez:
Number two, you'll see some exciting announcements here over the next couple weeks of some really unique things that we're going to do around tax preparation for students and families. That's another thing my dad taught me and thank you, dad. He taught me how to file my taxes at an early age but again, a missing layer in education. When you start getting your first job and you've got to figure out how to file your taxes. We're also doing some unique scholarship and incentive campaigns where we're going to be providing over $20,000 in scholarships to students and families that go through what we're calling our financial literacy bee. It's a free online program. You can find it everfi.com and students can go through and just finish some really unique modules just over a short period of time and complete an essay. And we're going to be selecting some winners who receive 529 scholarships.
Ray Martinez:
And then the last thing would just be some of these announcements of some of the new topic areas that we're tackling. We developed a really great partnership with Citizens Bank, providing student loan instruction to students all across the country. The marketplaces education that we're doing in partnership with you all. Data science and careers in financial services will be coming. And just a lot of exciting things but most importantly here, I think we want and if there's any teachers listening, we've designed and built everything with teachers in mind. And when you go back and you think about your career, Pete, and who has influenced you I assume that there's probably a teacher or a coach or some figure along the way that helped influence you. And we just fundamentally believe that our teachers have done heroic job and how can we can continue to support our teachers as the demands of that job continue to change and giving them the right tools and the right resources is one of the things that we're focused on.
Pete Asch:
Well, thank you for all the support you give teachers and thank you for joining us today Inside the ICE House.
Pete Asch:
That's our conversation for this week. Our guest was Ray Martinez, co-founder and president of EVERFI. If you like what you've heard, please rate us on iTunes so other folks know where to find us. Got a question or comment, you'd like one of our experts to attack on a future show? Email us at [email protected] or tweet at us @icehousepodcast. Our show is produced by Ken Abel and Ian Woolf. I'm Pete Asch, your host, signing off from the library of the New York Stock Exchange. Thanks for listening, talk to you next week.
Speaker 1:
Information contained in this podcast was obtained in part from publicly available sources and not independently verified. Neither ICE nor its affiliates make any representations or warranties expressed or implied as to the accuracy or completeness of the information and do not sponsor, approve or endorse any of the content herein, all of which is presented solely for informational and educational purposes. Nothing herein constitutes an offer to sell, a solicitation of an offer to buy any security or a recommendation of any security or trading practice. Some portions of the preceding conversation may have been edited for the purpose of length or clarity.
