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About Peaks Learn

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Peaks Learn is a free financial education provided by Peaks B.V., a Dutch investment firm authorised by the Dutch Authority for the Financial Markets (AFM) to provide execution-only investment services.

On this page, you'll read why and how we created Peaks Learn. We’ll explain the role of Peaks and the research that informed our process.

Why we built Peaks Learn

The Peaks app was built to make responsible investing easy, but an easy app is only half of the story.

In addition to breaking down the barriers to investing, we want to make sure people do so from a healthy starting point, equipped with as much knowledge as possible. That means knowing what needs to be in place before you invest, and understanding what investing actually involves.

Financial literacy is more important than ever.

Financial products have never been more accessible. At the same time, the financial landscape is getting more complex, while people's understanding of basic financial concepts isn't keeping up. (Lasmiatun, 2024)

Financial resilience comes first.

Being able to handle an unexpected bill, keep a buffer and manage your day-to-day money is essential to financial wellbeing. It's the foundation everything else is built on. (OECD, 2023)

Responsible investing needs at least two things.

You need money you can truly spare, and a real understanding of a few key financial concepts, such as compound interest, risk and inflation. (Nibud, Kaiser & Lusardi, 2024)

Peaks Learn exists to close this literacy gap. Our aim is to help people become financially resilient and empowered: first and foremost in their everyday lives, and in investing, should they ever choose to.

This content is available free of charge to anyone, including people who are not yet, and may never become, clients of Peaks B.V.

How we built Peaks Learn

Peaks Learn is grounded in research on financial literacy, financial wellbeing and how people learn about money.

We followed established guidelines. Our approach draws on work by Stanford University's Institute for Economic Policy Research (SIEPR) and its Initiative for Financial Decision-Making (IFDM). This includes the "Big Three": the core concepts researchers use to measure financial literacy.

  • Compound interest: how money grows over time
  • Inflation: how rising prices affect what your money is worth
  • Risk and diversification: why spreading your money reduces risk

We use storytelling. Research from SIEPR found that simple storytelling helps people understand financial concepts. That's why our courses follow relatable characters and real-life situations rather than abstract theory.

We started with the essentials. Our first three courses cover the knowledge linked to a level of financial literacy that supports financial wellbeing. Together, they take you from the basic building blocks of personal finance to understanding what investing involves.

Important information about Peaks Learn

Peaks B.V. also runs an investment platform, so we have a general commercial interest in people understanding investing and getting involved in it. That’s why we invest in this content. To keep our learning content separate from that interest, it never promotes our products, comments on specific financial instruments or encourages you to trade. We check every piece against this standard before we publish it. If you have questions or concerns about this, email us at klantenservice@peaks.nl.

How Peaks Learn is funded

Peaks B.V. pays to produce all the content featured on Peaks Learn. It’s free for everyone who uses it, and we don’t currently work with paid or co‑branded content partners. If that changes, we’ll clearly name the partner on the content they’re involved in and explain their role.

What Peaks Learn is, and isn’t

  • It’s general educational information about financial concepts, products and markets.
  • It doesn’t recommend, promote or assess any specific financial instrument, fund or issuer.
  • It isn’t investment advice. It doesn’t take your personal financial situation, your goals or how much risk you’re willing to take into account, so don’t use it as the basis for an investment decision.
  • It isn’t investment research as defined by applicable financial markets regulation.
  • It doesn’t commit you to anything. You don’t have to open an account, invest or use any Peaks product or service if you engage with Peaks Learn.

The research behind Peaks Learn

Before we wrote a single lesson, we looked at what research says about financial literacy: how many people have it, what it changes in their lives and which teaching methods actually work. We read academic studies, European policy research, survey data on young people in the Netherlands and long-term data on investment performance. Each source shaped a concrete choice in our courses, from which topics we cover to how we explain them.

Below, we summarise what we learned under three themes, with our most referenced sources listed under each theme.

Financial education works

Financial education measurably improves both what people know and how they handle money, especially when it comes to budgeting and saving. The effects are comparable to those of maths and reading programmes (Kaiser et al., 2022). Young people who have received financial education save, invest and manage their spending better (Lasmiatun, 2024). How you teach matters too: short stories raised correct answers on risk diversification and compound interest by about 17 percentage points, with the biggest gains among people with lower incomes and less education (Stanford SIEPR, 2025). That's why our courses follow relatable characters through real-life situations, are digital and easy to fit into daily life, and revisit maths-heavy topics like compound interest and inflation, which people tend to forget more quickly.

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The knowledge gap is real

Only about half of EU residents answered at least three of five basic financial questions correctly, and women scored 18 percentage points lower than men. Higher financial knowledge goes together with lower financial fragility and more confidence about retirement (Bruegel, 2024). Closer to home, cost of living is the top concern for young people in the Netherlands (28% of Gen Z and 35% of millennials), and many worry about their daily expenses and future finances (Deloitte, 2024). This showed us the need for content that starts at zero and assumes no prior knowledge. It also told us that financial resilience has to come before investing, so our first courses cover budgeting, buffers and everyday money decisions.

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Knowledge and confidence shape financial decisions

People with both financial knowledge and confidence in their own abilities are more likely to invest, while fear of risk holds many back (Cupák et al., 2022). Financial literacy also improves financial wellbeing partly by strengthening financial self-efficacy: people's belief that they can manage their money (Lone and Bhat, 2022). Twenty years of research link higher financial literacy to better-informed investment choices and healthier financial habits, but income, culture, access to financial services and emotions matter too (Garg and Singh, 2025). So our courses build confidence step by step with practical examples and quizzes, address the emotional side of money, and recognise that everyone starts from a different situation.

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