The winners are Seyla Gómez, from Granada, who came first; Rafael Ruiz, from Seville, in second place, and Victoria Moriana, from Cordoba, in third place

Five students from secondary schools in Cordoba, Granada, Huelva, Seville and Murcia took part today, Friday, in the final of the 14th Financial Olympics of the Edufinet Project, promoted by Unicaja Banco and the Unicaja Foundation.

The five finalists of the 14th Financial Olympics, a competition which initially attracted almost 400 participants, have today presented the conclusions of their work to the jury. The winners are Seyla Gómez Gutiérrez, from IES Severo Ochoa in Granada, who came first; Rafael Ruiz González, from IES Ítaca in Seville, in second place, and Victoria Moriana Jiménez, from IES Antonio Gala in Córdoba, in third place.

Two runners-up prizes went to Alejandro Agustín Aragón, from IES La Flota in Murcia, and Helena Fernández Martín de Soto, from IES Puerta de Andalucía in Huelva. A total USA Scholarship from the Unicaja Foundation has also been raffled among the participants, which will cover a three-week stay in the United States as part of a cultural exchange programme based on family and school coexistence. The winner was Seyla Gómez Gutiérrez.

As for the prizes, the first place winner received an iPhone SE; the second, a 64GB iPad, and the third, an Apple Watch SE. The winning schools and teachers also received awards.

Of the 387 students who registered for the 14th Financial Olympics of Edufinet, a total of 307 completed the case study. In the first part, participants had to solve a practical case study, with the objective of determining aspects such as where to invest savings, deciding whether it is better to buy a home or rent it, choosing which loan is more suitable out of two proposed options and the costs associated with buying a home. Today, Friday, the five finalists presented their conclusions to the jury.

Composition of the jury

The jury that determined the winners was made up of the Director of the Edufinet Project, José M. Domínguez; The CEO of the Unicaja Banking Foundation, Sergio Corral; Victoria Romero, a member of the Unicaja Banco's Department of Studies; Juan Carlos López, Head of Sustainability and Stakeholder Relations at CECA; the Director of the Bank of Spain Branch in Malaga, Adolfo Gil, and the Technical Secretary General of the Malaga Association of Economists, Isabel Rodríguez.

On behalf of the university institutions that collaborate with Edufinet, the Dean of the Faculty of Business Sciences and Tourism of the University of Huelva, Juan José de la Vega, also formed part of the jury; Raúl Mata, Director of the Secretariat for Employability and Student Entrepreneurship at the University of Jaén; the Dean of the Faculty of Economics and Business Studies at the University of Malaga, Eugenio Luque, and Francisca García, lecturer at the UNED.

Financial Education for Young People seminars

The 14th Financial Olympics is a complement to the 14th Financial Literacy Days for Young People, in which 14,250 secondary school (ESO and Bachillerato) students from 32 Spanish provinces participated in a total of 462 sessions during this year's edition of the event.

The Edufinet Project has been promoting financial literacy initiatives for almost 20 years and currently has the collaboration of 17 universities and more than a dozen business entities and organisations, as well as a working team of around 80 members, who participate in this task selflessly.

Since the beginning, nearly 244,000 people have participated in the various conferences, workshops, courses and lectures. Meanwhile, the Edufinet Project's websites have registered more than 19 million visits to date from almost 180 countries.

All this has made Unicaja one of the most active players in the fields of financial education and inclusion, in the exercise of its Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) and its commitment to society.