Meet The App That Wants To Teach Your Kids About Personal Finance

This week's Fintech Focus podcast takes a look at the burgeoning Generation Z market, and how developers and entrepreneurs are finding ways to bring financial education to teens.

When we talk about fintech, we don’t often think about how it’s impacting the youngest generations. But it turns out today's teens are actually making strides to learn about and plan their savings, more so than millennials before them.

That's the basis of Current, a debit and credit card app that aims to teach Generation Z the importance of financial education and budgeting for the future.

Listen to our interview with Current CEO Stuart Sopp here. Here are some of our favorite moments from the interview:

On the challenges of building a product for very different age groups:

“What a teenager wants is probably not what a parent wants for them and vice versa, right? Balancing this conversation has been one of our key challenges, but also key assets and defensibility. Between 13 and 16, the product we have currently is doing extremely well. Sixteen to 18 is an area where the summer jobs start, we're rolling out the routing and account numbers, the remote deposit capture over this quarter, when it will look much more like a traditional bank account in many ways, with some UI tweaks and maybe even some upgraded cards.”

One the Customer Acquisition Cost of teens:

“I think customer acquisition cost is pretty highly correlated with the size of the problem you're solving, and maybe a secondary event like the size of the market. There's 27 million teens between 13 and 18. If I was to increase Gen Z's size, that addressable market goes to 55 to 75 million. It's gigantic, it's already the largest cohort in America, and on top of that, half of them still are given cash by their parents in this trending market into digitization. CAC isn't really the issue for us. It's about the market is big enough, the CAC is one of which we have to show restraint and show diligence on how we grow. In terms of channels, paid acquisition, TV, some traditional out of home have all been very good for us. Pretty much wherever there's a parent, we're able to acquire a customer.”

Listen to the full interview with Current CEO Stuart Sopp here.