Thanks to the development of new information and communication technologies, there has been an increase in trade in services, which - until recently - have been considered nontradable. The importance of the services sector in the economy should be stressed, as this sector constitutes a 70-percent share of the GDP in the developed economies. The whole accounting departments or customer support call centres outsourced are only some of the services that take advantage of new technologies. Some of those innovations have already become a permanent element of our reality: the possibility to purchase an airline ticket via the Internet, creation of inventory control systems in IT companies, a possibility to gather and process information on consumer behaviour. The aforementioned solutions embody the new forms of labour organisation and the development of new products and services, which are becoming increasingly common. Research by van Ark 29 indicates that the results of a comparison of the growth in labour productivity in the services sector in the USA and the EU-15 in the past 10 years are in favour of the USA. The advantage of the USA has resulted primarily from a higher labour productivity in retail and wholesale trade and in the financial services. Among the causes for the lower increase in labour productivity in the EU countries one should mention lower innovative capabilities of the European companies and a lack of reforms that could have forced the sector to take advantage of its potential.
These factors will become more acute in an increasingly complex and technologydriven financial system. Financial education has an important role in breaking such barriers. This will require more innovative approaches, broader partnerships and a deeper understanding of the social attitudes. Our own experience in Malaysia through the work of Bank Negara Malaysia and the Credit Counselling and Debt Management Agency (a subsidiary of the Bank) has shown that the impact of financial education strategies depends  2  BIS central bankers’ speeches  on the ability to effectively combine broad-based and targeted strategies, and having a wellcoordinated approach that relies on multiple channels to reach different groups. Financial education is also a lifelong endeavour, from encouraging children to save their pocket money to helping adults attain financial security and independence for their old age. In supporting the inclusion agenda, financial education initiatives in Malaysia are designed as an important life skill, where consumers are exposed to knowledge on financial management during the different periods in their life. An increasing trend is for financial capability to be promoted from an early age through the integration of financial education into the formal school curriculum that covers basic money management, spending and savings, credit and debts, e-payments, financial risk management and consumer responsibilities. For the youth and adult segments of the population, Malaysia has also adopted a life event approach to the development and delivery of financial capability programmes.