Consumer Financial Protection Director Richard Cordray said Wednesday financial education by financial services firms can be a model for American industry.

Cordray’s statement came at the unveiling of a joint financial literacy initiative by the CFPB and the Financial Services Roundtable in a seminar.

The roundtable represents the largest banking, insurance, asset management and credit card programs in the nation.

Cordray said the joint effort will focus on education for students, workers, the elderly and elder caregivers.

When asked why a twentieth federal financial literacy program was needed in addition to the 19 cited last year by the General Accountability Office, the investigative arm of Congress, Cordray lashed into the GAO for falsely seeing the efforts as duplications of each other.

As examples, he said, financial education training for veterans won’t help rural communities broadly and vice versa.

With states requiring elementary and secondary educators to teach a multitude of subjects, the CFPB head said financial education can be added without subtracting time from other learning by making it part of other learning.

Students can write essays on personal financial matters for English assignments just as well as they can write on other topics, Cordray said.

At the meeting, Financial Services Roundtable CEO Tim Pawlenty said FSR has dropped its objections to the CFPB’s complaint data base because the agency was doing a better job of explaining the system to his association.