Relentless Expert exchange and financial inclusion paths to promote stable debt advice services and fresh START

ended

Exercise of social and economic rights presupposes an effective financial inclusion where individuals and businesses have access to useful and affordable financial products and services that meet their needs – transactions, payments, savings, credit and insurance (World Bank). Since 2001, economic and pandemic crisis have compromised a large part of European population life, increasing poverty and over-indebtedness cases mainly in country like Italy with structure gaps in financial literacy and debt advisory services. Aware of these needs, Movimento Consumatori (MC) has built up a national network of NGO, foundations against loan-sharking, National Institution and Italian Universities focused on financial education and debt-advice services. Based on this experience, RE-START aim is to increase the accessibility of debt advice services to Italian consumers, improving the operational effectiveness of the structures for providing debt advice services already in use. Therefore, to achieve project aims, MC are going to develop new and innovative tools (remote assistance service and video clips) to collect consumer needs and offering in the meantime a first concrete deb-advice aid to deal with financial issues. Moreover, to improve the operational effectiveness of the structures already used by MC, a European network of experts, technicians and debt-advisors will be made through workshops focused on debt-advice service. Therefore, RE-START project will implement an innovative and replicable solutions addressed at the European associations that already perform debt-advice service, or would be, enhancing quality service, standardizing process and information exchange to create a permanent network of experts operating at local, national and European level, in all the matters related to debt-advice. The meetings outcomes, collected in a public report, will update the MC specialist training activities to increase the debt-advisors skills already involved in national services.