YEREVAN, October 10. / ARKA /. The Central Bank of Armenia will soon approve a long-term strategy designed to raise the level of financial literacy of the population and submit it the government's consideration, Armenak Darbinyan, a Central Bank of Armenia Board member, said during a conference that discussed the results of an EBRD training program.

"Raising the level of financial literacy of the population has two major objectives - protecting the interests of citizens and increasing the level of their involvement in the financial sector," he said.
According to Darbinyan, improving citizens' financial literacy is an essential component of the Armenian financial market.

"One of the major challenges currently facing the financial market of Armenia is to ensure its diversification, because about 90 % is held by banks. The remaining components – insurance companies, securities market and credit institutions need to expand and develop,” he said.

According to him, the strategy includes 11 targets, such as planning of personal and family budgets, effective management of loans, collection and analysis of financial information when making important decisions and so on, which will be used every five years to conduct a monitoring of the financial market for interim evaluation of the strategy.
The European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) has carried out in Armenia a training program aimed at increasing confidence in the banking system among clients receiving remittances from abroad, as well as fostering bank accounts opening.

The program, running for 9 months, embraced 24 thousand people. As a result 10,000 new individual bank accounts were opened. -0-