Ulaanbaatar /MONTSAME/. Over 70 internationally recognized speakers and attendees from more than 20 countries, such as India, Australia, Bulgaria, Japan, and Indonesia, gathered at the Singapore Applied Psychology Conference on December 8- 9 to present their most current research advances under the theme of Psychological Well-being. The main goal of this annual conference is to discuss the advances, limitations, obstacles, and solutions the presenters experience regarding their respective research topics. This year, two psychological research projects were presented at the conference by Optimal NMax LLC from Mongolia. As Mongolia attended the conference for the first time, the topic and the population itself were relatively new to the attendees.

To briefly highlight the research findings:

1. The first research project covered the most common emotional and behavioral problems among Mongolian adolescents such as depression, suicidal tendencies, anxiety, self-harming, bullying, etc., and how the development and severity of such problems are explained through the quality of one’s surrounding environment such as family, peers, and school. Very briefly, parental verbal and physical abuse, peer pressure, and bullying were the shared risk factors that influenced all the emotional and behavioral problems investigated in this project. 
2. The second research project on psychological predictors of credit risk was an interdisciplinary project between the psychological and financial sectors. The research results were fresh and innovative to fellow researchers as the topic was relatively new to both scholars in Mongolia and those around the world. The researchers have attempted to discover how psychological factors determine one’s loan repayment behavior in the last four years and experimented with microlending based on the research results to over 500,000 accounts in collaboration with the Zeely mobile lending application. In Mongolia, credit risk is assessed through very traditional hard data- the social insurance payment amount and regular employment status- creating non-inclusivity for some customers. The researchers believe a psychological profile-based credit risk assessment model is important for bringing financial services to people who have been left out. The full paper of both research projects will be published by Springer Singapore in 2023.

Optimal NMax LLC is a private company that introduces psychological scientific outcomes into various practical sectors, including financial services. The company also offers innovative solutions for social issues based on their behavioral data analysis and implements various projects. The researchers concluded that networking with influential scholars from other countries was an invaluable experience for their future research development plans.