As digital financial tools become part of everyday life, IDBank and Idram have made financial literacy a defining part of their work. Regional Post spoke with Tatevik Vardevanyan, Head of the Communications and Social Responsibility Programs Division, about why teaching people to use money well has become inseparable from the business of banking, and about the campaign they’ve built to close the gap.
Text : Margarit Mirzoyan Photo : IDBank & Idram
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Literacy as Strategy
Financial literacy initiatives are easy to frame as goodwill, a pleasant extension of a company’s public image, something that sits at a comfortable distance from the real business of banking. Tatevik Vardevanyan sees it the other way around. For a fintech company, she suggests, financial literacy is not charity that runs parallel to the work. It is work.
The reasoning is straightforward. When a customer does not understand the tools, the consequences are real, and they fall on the company as much as on the user. A literate customer, in contrast, is a confident one. Without fear, people use the available tools more freely and reach for more of what these companies offer. And fear, Mrs. Vardevanyan notes, has only one antidote—knowledge. “The only way to overcome that fear is when you have the necessary skills.”
That conviction did not come from instinct alone. Thinking through its corporate social responsibility, IDBank surveyed its beneficiaries and partners to learn where society most expected it to act. Financial literacy rose to the top. Not healthcare, not global education, but something far closer to the bank’s own expertise. “Everyone expected us to help the nation become, in a practical sense, more financially literate.” So the bank chose to focus there, and the campaign “Financially Literate with Idram and IDBank” became the face of that decision.
Tatevik Vardevanyan, Head of the Communications and
Corporate Social Responsibility Programs Division at IDBank and Idram
The Confidence Gap Outside Yerevan
The need for financial literacy initiatives is felt most heavily outside the capital. The tools are already there. What lingers is hesitation, and Mrs. Vardevanyan is clear about its source. The fear comes from not fully knowing how to use the tools correctly, compounded by occasional stories of fraud and scams. Lacking a clear way to protect themselves, many people simply stay away, missing out on the full range of benefits that remote services could offer them.
The stakes are real. “Today, people in the regions can do literally the same things anyone in Yerevan can do,” she says. Everything happens online, so geography no longer decides who has access to banking, credit, or savings. What decides it now is confidence.
Starting in Schools, Reaching Everyone
The “Financially Literate with Idram and IDBank” campaign took shape around that gap. It launched in 2024, starting where habits form earliest - schools and camps. From there, it broadened. Within two years, it has reached students and adults, and it has already drawn roughly 1,500 participants from every region of the country, with new sessions still being added.
What makes the campaign special is how it adapts to whoever is in the room. The team arrives prepared, but flexible. “We go to these meetings already knowing the topics and formats that might interest them, but also on the spot, based on the questions, we move the session forward in a particular direction,” Mrs. Vardevanyan explains.
Each group reveals something different. The youngest surprised the team most. “When we had sessions with the fourth graders, we were fascinated by the knowledge. They knew everything,” she recalls. They listen most attentively when the subject turns to scams, and the team later learned that children pass on what they had heard during the sessions to their parents. The team usually brings the Idram Junior mascot to schools, and the children recognize him instantly, calling out that they already have the application. Students, on the other hand, engaged eagerly with both fraud and behavioral economics. Older participants, among them the women supported by the Zinapah Foundation, were drawn to the practical mechanics of loans and deposits.
One theme that cuts across every age group is fraud. Nearly everyone has heard of a scam, yet few understand how such schemes actually work. When it comes to educating on this topic, the PR team builds the programs but, for more in-depth material, they bring in colleagues from other departments, preferably those with teaching experience. The effort continues online too, through steady social media reminders about the scams currently circulating in the industry. The campaign has since reached universities, most recently in a series of sessions at the Economics Faculty of Yerevan State University, on behavioral economics, decision making, communication, and fraud. The bank watches one measure in particular - a real decline in the number of people falling victim to financial scams and fraud. Mrs. Vardevanyan is quick to add a warning, and it doubles as a message to readers. Scam scenarios keep evolving, so one should always stay alert and be careful.
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Learning by Using
These educational visits constitute only half of the strategy. The other is built into the products themselves, and it starts with beneficiaries too young for a bank account. In 2023, Idram introduced Idram Junior, the first Armenian financial app built for children. The idea behind it is simple. “Kids usually don’t realize what cash money is, let alone the cashless kind, so they have to interact with it from childhood to know its worth, the ways to use it, and the ways to avoid scams,” Mrs. Vardevanyan says. The application gives them that contact within firm limits. Children cannot send money to each other or to outside parties. They can receive funds from their parents, share money with a sibling, pay by QR code, or top up a phone bill, and parents oversee every transaction. The design lets a child learn from direct experience while a parent keeps watch.
The payoff is generational. “When kids know what a loan is, what interest rates are, how to make a deposit, and how to save, when the time comes as adults they will make more well-informed and responsible financial decisions,” she says.
Keeping children engaged is part of the design. The app gives them reasons to return—competitions to follow, news to track, and Junius, a game built into Idram Junior where children learn about money and online safety as they play. Learning, in this model, is not a separate lesson but a by-product of everyday use.
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Equipping Small Businesses
The same thinking exists in the bank’s approach to business. IDBank recently launched ID Distributor, a financial tool that reorganizes how small, medium, and micro enterprises handle payments and accounting with their suppliers.
Previously, a supplier would deliver goods and then chase payment, sometimes returning to a store repeatedly to collect what was owed. If the store could not pay on the spot, its shelves emptied and the supply chain stalled. ID Distributor breaks that bottleneck. The supplier is paid at once through a dedicated QR code, and a store short of funds can use a Rocket Distributor Loan, available only to pay suppliers, then repay it gradually from each cashless transaction.
Once again, the tool is only half of the story. “ID Distributor also requires a certain level of financial literacy, even though it’s quite easy to use,” Mrs. Vardevanyan notes, and that is the point. Putting a tool in a business owner’s hands and teaching them to use it well is itself a form of financial education. IDBank built ID Distributor within the Reconomy project, co-financed by the Government of Sweden and Helvetas Foundation, and launched it with training for enterprises and suppliers alike, alongside video tutorials and other materials. For Mrs. Vardevanyan, the goal reaches past the product itself. “By providing these financial tools and promoting their active use, we facilitate cashless turnover, transparent trade, and, of course, financial literacy,” she says. That is what the whole campaign is built to do. It does not promise to make personal finance simple. It promises to make people steady enough to use it well, and for a company whose own business runs on that confidence, teaching and banking turn out to be the same work.