Building a financial future in today’s society as an adult is difficult enough, but imagine the challenge our kids are facing. With 40% of parents believing it should be taught in school, young adults often start from scratch without assistance. And even though kids often begin working at 13 years old, or they at least receive pocket money from their parents or guardians, there is no direction on what to do with it to ensure future security. That’s where Kit comes in.
Kit is an earning-and-learning app for kids that simultaneously gives kids a transaction account with prepaid card and teaches them small financial lessons along the way.
Kit is a kids pocket money app that teaches kids about finances in a fun and interactive way, helping them to take their first steps towards financial independence. Built by CommBank, Kit provides the platform for your kids to learn all the normal functions of your traditional bank account.
Kit provides a fun and instructive chat-based learning platform geared towards kids through a character in the app. When you’re younger, most children tend to be visual learners. Kit enables this by providing multiple visual aids to help children understand their savings goals, from colours, to stickers to animated rising tides as they get closer to reaching their goal.
When you open up a traditional bank account - even one for your children - you’re often left with the most boring app or computer interface that one can think of, and trying to explain everything to your kids can be draining. It doesn’t help you to achieve the goal of giving them greater financial independence.
With Kit, your kids can learn by experience with nifty nudges and bite-sized educational content. Kids are at the heart of Kit, and the app is designed to be simple, visual and customisable so kids can be independent and learn in their own way. While they might not have to worry about bills and rent just yet, you can apply it to other areas of personal financial responsibility. One of the things that this could teach them is to set aside a percentage of their earnings to put into a savings account.
Kit gives you complete parental control and oversight over your child’s financial manoeuvres. For example, it enables you to agree on and create job lists for your child with an earnings total to help them keep track of their tasks and the financial rewards. This is another responsibility-teaching tool about the value of hard work. Kit also has customisable controls including spend limits, merchant blocks, pin protection and real-time notifications.
Before Kit had even named its app, which launched in May 2022, it engaged leading professional services organisation, Ernst & Young, Australia (EY Australia) to develop a youth financial capability framework.
The framework was used to both identify Kit’s focus areas for building kids’ financial capability, and measure the impact of Kit on kids’ financial capability. These indicators, which formed the focus areas of the Australian Money Matters Report, are the ability to talk about money; be informed, empowered and conscious when spending money; plan for the future; and safely and productively participate in the ‘earning’ economy.
The report found that children using Kit were significantly more likely to earn money on their own, with a 14.2% increase in parents and carers reporting this behaviour. Additionally, kids using Kit were more likely to save their own money, with a 7.8% increase in parents and carers reporting this behaviour. Kids using Kit were also more likely to apply strategies when buying things after four months of using the Kit App, with a 4.6% increase in reported behaviour.
Kit operates by giving your kids enough financial freedom and responsibility to be teachable and relatively scalable but not so much as to allow them to make significant financial mistakes. Kit works by introducing kids to the concept of virtual ‘PayDays’, where they’ll be ‘paid’ the money through a prepaid card.
You load this prepaid card with the amount of money your kid typically earns in their pocket money. Then your kid can spend it and have cash transferred onto the card on PayDay for their hard work at their weekly chores.
As your child takes their first steps towards financial responsibility and financial freedom in a fun, intuitive, simplistic environment, Kit is there to help. Though Kit doesn’t give your kids complete free rein! In Boss Mode, you will have extensive control over the app’s functionalities, which can be tailored to your child’s personality and your comfort levels.
This includes spending limits, reminders and more.
No matter your age, saving for a goal can be complicated if you don’t have a goal in mind. These goals will be pretty simple for young kids - a new pair of shoes, perhaps a favourite sports jersey, or a new video game. Saving Stacks give kids visual representations of how much money they’ve earned and how close they are to achieving their savings goals. Kit has some pretty cool features too, like an animated rising tide – the Stack fills up with water the closer they get to achieving their goal.
One of the most important things you can teach your children is financial literacy and responsibility. Though if you struggle to handle your finances, WeMoney’s 'WeTalkCents' podcast is available to help with your difficulties.
While some might think they’re too young to learn about finances, Kit makes earning and learning fun and intuitive, providing small tidbits of educational banking and finance information. To learn more about Kit, check out their site. Collective learning is one of the best ways to learn financial responsibility. For children, it's even more critical that they learn these lessons forward into adulthood.
Check out the We Talk Cents episode where we talk with Yish from Kit about the current state of the economy and money hacks for kids of all ages!
Disclaimer
Kit is a brand of CBA New Digital Businesses Pty Ltd ABN 38 633 072 830 trading as HEY KIT. CBA New Digital Businesses Pty Ltd is a wholly owned but non-guaranteed subsidiary of Commonwealth Bank of Australia ABN 48 123 123 124 (CBA). CBA New Digital Businesses Pty Ltd is not an Authorised Deposit-taking Institution for the purposes of the Banking Act 1959 and its obligations do not represent deposits or other liabilities of CBA. CBA New Digital Businesses Pty Ltd has been appointed as authorised representative (001296799) of Hay Limited (ABN 34 629 037 403 AFSL 515459), who is the issuer of the Kit Account and associated Kit Cards. The CBA New Digital Businesses Pty Ltd Financial Services Guide is available here. Any advice provided is general only and does not take into account your objectives, financial situation or needs so please consider whether it is appropriate for you. Please consider the Product Disclosure Statement available here, before making any decision about the products. Fees and charges may apply. The Target Market Determination is also available here. Please visit Important Legal Information to access detailed terms and conditions about our app and the services, our Privacy Policy and other important legal documents.
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