Tom Hamza knows there are many Canadians who feel lost in the world of investment and finance. The new president of the Toronto-based Investor Education Fund wants to restore financial confidence — and he has good reason.

“The importance of investor education is greater than ever, simply because the social security blanket in Canada is thinner than ever,” says Hamza, who took the president’s job at the IEF this past December, moving over from Toronto-based Futura Rewards (formerly KidsFutures), for which he was vice president of finance. He is replacing Terri Williams, who left the IEF last spring.

“We no longer live in a patriarchal society, in which people can depend on pensions or a social security network,” says Hamza. “Knowing this stuff is a critical life skill. I feel very strongly that investor education has to be advanced.”

The IEF was established six years ago by the Ontario Securities Commission to fulfil its public mandate of keeping investors informed. Funded by fines paid by negligent advisors, the IEF acts as a storehouse of resources and as a vehicle for spreading financial information.

The challenge is to take a subject with which people may be uncomfortable and convince them not only that the information is relevant but also that they have a responsibility to obtain at least a basic understanding of their own finances. It’s exactly that reluctant audience Hamza wants to target — from people without a clue about financial matters to those who understand finances but still have questions — a spectrum he estimates includes up to 70% of the general population.

With six years of the IEF’s content development already available to this audience, Hamza’s job is to come up with a way to motivate people to access it. Hamza himself has more than six years under his belt in strategy consulting with Deloitte Consulting and A.T. Kearney Consulting from 1996 to 2003, during which he advised financial services firms in Canada and abroad; he knows what is needed when it comes to developing a marketing strategy that will reach the average investor.

There’s a big gap in the information people need in order to move from Square 1 in planning their financial futures to understanding finer points such as the risks of specific products. There is no central database, Hamza says, and the quality of information varies from source to source.

He plans to turn the IEF into the financial information source of choice by building on the fund’s established programs, and communicating them to the public.

Branding is also something Hamza knows about. At Futura Rewards, he helped build a rewards program into a financial services strategy aimed at Canadians concerned about saving for their children’s education. Futura members can use their loyalty rewards for a number of financial goals, including education and retirement savings. He got 300,000 people to join that rewards program.

Now Hamza has an ambitious agenda for the IEF. He plans to apply the theory of how people learn about financial services to reality.

“We identified major inflection points for people — a first job, marriage, the birth of a child,” he says. “At those points in life, people need certain financial information. But we also know this is not necessarily the time they want to sit down for six hours and go through a financial course.”

In order to meet investors at those “inflection points” in a time-sensitive manner, Hamza is developing more tools like the IEF’s current mutual fund calculator, which shows people how much they are paying in fees when they buy mutual funds. What these new tools will look like is still under wraps, but their purpose will be to equip investors with the right questions to ask their financial advisors.

Some of these tools — along with newsletters, articles and glossaries — will be available on the IEF’s revamped Web site
(www.investored.ca), scheduled to be relaunched in March.

A crucial part of Hamza’s strategy is to make the Web site the IEF’s most public and direct source of investor information. The site is designed to function as a tool, not only for investors but also for advisors, who can use it to supplement the information they provide to clients.

The IEF has also formed partnerships with organizations that work with people who have special needs when it comes to financial education, such as the Canadian National Institute for the Blind and groups working with new Canadians. Hamza wants to revamp these relationships with programs to bridge gaps in financial knowledge.

@page_break@“We want to grow the partnerships so we have a clear plan of how to reach as many people as possible and how to do it in the most cost-effective way,” Hamza says. “We’re really talking about changing the way people think, instilling in them that they have a responsibility — that this is not something others are going to take care of for them.”

One successful partnership is with the faculty of education at the University of Western Ontario in London, Ont., at which Hamza earned an MBA in 2001. The IEF currently equips teachers with tools about how money and markets work that they can use in their classrooms.

But Hamza would like to see financial education given a stronger emphasis by Ontario’s education system. Until that happens, the IEF will continue to fund initiatives aimed at students. It has teamed up with the Cambridge (Ont.) Chamber of Commerce to present Funny Money, a one-man comedy show that teaches money basics at high schools in and around the Greater Toronto Area.

Hamza clearly has plenty of ideas about communicating financial information, but getting the word out about the IEF may be a little more difficult. In order for inves-tors to use the Web site, they need to know about the IEF. Hamza is working with the OSC on ways to promote the IEF without advertising.

And he knows just what message needs to be communicated: “It’s that you have to take control of your financial life. It’s not rocket science. It takes a consistent focus on exercise and nutrition to be healthy. To be financially healthy, it takes a consistent focus, as well.” IE