How FinTech Will Lead Financial Literacy in Teenagers

The teenage years are widely thought to be the hardest years to manage, as teens’ need for space and freedom conflicts with parents’ need for safety and security. Although these years are stressful, they also have the potential to be the time when vital life skills are perfected. Ensuring teens learn the skills needed to manage their finances means parents can feel more secure as they become more independent and leave the nest.

Although it may seem like finance is an area teenagers would be loath to learn, a MediaCom study found that 68% of teenagers agree that starting to save early on in life is important. Having grown up in a recession, they know the importance of finance and (having witnessed the damaging effects of the Big Banks) they are the perfect audience for new FinTech initiatives designed to impart knowledge.

Moneythink and its app MoneythinkMobile were created to help teenagers learn finance skills. The app uses concepts and systems that are part of today’s teens’ lives—emojis, hashtags, social media, etc.—in order to relay important financial information in a way teens can understand and retain. In fact, it calls itself “a gamified Instagram for finances.” Various challenges are given to users and these challenges put them face-to-face with their spending habits and the consequences of these habits. By creating the app, Moneythink has expanded its program to include any teen wanting to learn, even if they are not in range of Moneythink’s campus classes.

A healthy economy and society needs people who are financially aware. Expecting that people are magically going to understand finance as soon as they reach the legal age is a sure recipe for disaster, and FinTech understands this. Creating systems that get teens interested in money and teach them the skills needed to grow into financially-responsible adults is a great way to ensure that future generations will have economies that thrive.

The 2008 Financial Crisis showed that Big Banks care less about a healthy economy than raking in massive profits and the younger generations know this. In fact, 70% of young adults would rather go to a dentist than a bank. What does this mean? Once these younger generations start to come into their own and start fully contributing to the economy, they will turn to FinTech as it offers financial services that truly meet their needs and they feel much more comfortable trusting these companies.