Financial education and financial inclusion: How lexicography makes sense

Financial inclusion has taken a very important role on the agenda of many international organizations and financial authorities across the globe. There are many reasons why financial inclusion is important, among these is the fact that a vast majority of the people in poverty are excluded from banking services. There is also the additional aspect of the technological development which has also changed our everyday lives; this in turn, due to the lack of an adequate financial education, prevents the use of the most advanced technology related to financial services and products. We performed an analysis of five dictionaries belonging to five financial organizations and regulators in Mexico, this allowed us to identify some deficiencies which prevent the users from resolving the linguistic phenomena given to them in relation to financial services. This situation creates a gap on the understanding of financial texts and on the knowledge acquisition of the un-experienced user of financial services. For this reason, we propose the creation of an interactive dictionary for financial education which we believe is the ideal tool to improve financial education, tackling the informational and cultural barriers. In this paper we study the role that the dictionaries have in the financial inclusion process and we explain in detail the methodological aspects that we have followed, which borrows heavily from lexicography, for the design of our interactive dictionary of finance. The result is a tool for the non-specialists and people who is entering the study of finance in which simplicity, practicality and reliability converge.