Keynote speaker: Ms. Basma Al-Tuwaijri

Speaker 1: Dr. Nasser Al-Qaoud

Speaker 2: Mr. Fahad Al-Qasim

Summary

The ambitious Saudi Vision 2030 devoted great importance to stimulating savings, financing, and investment through the “Financial Sector Development Program 2020”, which is one of the vision realization programs. It aims at creating a developed financial market, enabling financial institutions to support the growth of the private sector, and promoting and enabling financial planning. This program has several goals, the most important of which are achieving financial diversity, stability, and inclusion, digital transformation, and increasing the depth of the financial sector. As for the culture of saving, it cannot be built quickly. It requires concerted efforts by the State and the individuals. On the State’s side, it has made great efforts to develop programs and initiatives aimed at creating and strengthening this culture among members of society. However, these programs and initiatives will not be feasible if they do not go along with some tools that help realize them. The most important of these tools are finding the appropriate investment channels to accommodate people’s savings. This will be preconditioned by the fact that access to these channels has to be easy and available to all who are interested. These channels need to be varied with the awareness of risks.

The encouragement of a culture of savings requires untiring efforts by families and government institutions. Efforts of families should be consolidated to set an example for their members to avoid overspending by raising them to rationalize spending. As for educational institutions, curricula need to include materials on the importance and benefits of saving, through simple presentations and attractive success stories. This is in addition to the efforts made by the joint-stock companies to encourage savings funds in which the employees of these companies have their contributions. In the meantime, they are supported by the company by distributing rewarding returns in the form of rewards and incentives. Aramco and some of the leading companies (Communications and SABIC) are examples. These efforts go side by side with the government institutions responsible for the financial sector.

It is important to address the conflict between the goals of the Vision 2030 and some of the existing initiatives, such as stimulating borrowing for luxuries. What needs more discussion is the encouragement for consumption, and borrowing stimulation made by the banks for consumption and luxurious goods.

Contributions on the issue included the following themes:

• The importance of the culture of saving.
• The status of the culture of saving in Saudi society.
• Constraints to the culture of saving.
• Means enhancing the culture of saving by society members.

For more information on the issue, please refer to the link: https://bit.ly/2yWZoGF

Recommendations:

1. Calling on the Ministry of Finance and the Saudi Arabian Monetary Agency (SAMA) to develop the financial and monetary policies to maintain balance in the macroeconomy (total supply and total demand). This is to bridge the gap that may arise between the rates of planned saving and investment due to weak policies or lack of coordination between the two policies.
2. Encouraging government agencies and joint-stock companies of various types to establish saving funds or portfolios. Small deductions will be made from the employees’ salaries, and they will be supported by the company or agency as incentives or rewards. This a tradition common in some leading companies like (ARAMCO, SABIC, Telecommunications).
3. Calling on banks to launch initiatives and innovations for saving products that can accommodate all people’s needs to meet their levels of income and expectations.
4. Integrating saving concepts and forms in school curricula, considering saving an important value in the life of man. Such concepts and forms need to be integrated properly through attractive stories, easily understood examples, contests, and creative games.
5. Creating a culture of saving through media and other civil society institutions to educate people with low-level income following the best methods of consumption. This will lead to reducing consumption to a moderate level by families and individuals. The telecommunication companies may send messages encouraging the culture of saving.