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.