A lack of financial education for kids and teens can often snowball into young adults who are ill-equipped to manage their money. A new benefit offering that provides a kid-safe debit card and instills early money-minded lessons is working to provide families with a better way to guide their children to a more secure financial future.
According to a report by Annuity, fewer than half of people ages 18-68 scored above a 51% on a financial literacy test. Meanwhile, three quarters of teens say their personal financial knowledge comes from their parents, and feel less than confident when it comes to
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With this information in mind, Greenlight, which created a kid-friendly debit card and accompanying money app, has launched Greenlight for Work, a benefits program that helps employees manage their family finances and improve literacy. Greenlight partners including JPMorgan, T-Mobile and Morgan Stanley provided feedback that helped guide the development of the program, which offers a customized debit card and education on spending, earning,
"Financial wellness has really expanded over the past few years, but there really hasn't been anything that gives access to benefits for the whole family from a financial perspective," says Matt Wolf, SVP of Business Development at Greenlight. "[Families] are intertwined, so it makes all the sense in the world that employers are starting to focus on benefits that are family-friendly in ways that keep them happy and productive."
Working parents ranked money as their primary source of stress in Greenlight's survey — so it's no wonder they're looking for better ways to communicate with their children on the matter. Greenlight's original app, which is available through a subscription and currently used by six million families, is a way for parents to watch over their children's learning, and, Wolf says, can be a helpful refresher for parents as well. The focus, he says, is on convenience and peace of mind for parents — parental controls allow spending to be limited by amount and GPS location, for example — and engaging financial education.
"We have a gamified financial literacy experience that we're seeing tremendous engagement on, and it's not just that kids are completing these modules, but they're also retaining the knowledge," Wolf says. "These are not things that come naturally to a lot of people, and we found that through these engaging solutions it can really help the child, and by some extensions, the parent or caregiver."
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Of those surveyed, 98% of parents said employee benefits that impact their family's
"We've designed this offering to be a holistic financial wellness package for families," Wolf says. "We focus our content on the basics of building smart financial habits, which are more important now than ever."
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Greenlight's program options for employers go beyond those for working parents. In addition to providing a foundational platform for financial education with the employer-provided benefit, Greenlight also offers companies a way to give back to their community schools by becoming a corporate sponsor, contributing toward school or individual student achievement incentives.
"Greenlight for Work aligns with our mission of helping every family raise financially smart children," Wolf says. "In this economy we're going to see working families start to pull back on consumer spending, and this program lets an employer support their employees and families by making it free to get this great service, which is hugely impactful."
