Ask your parents for your allowance money? There’s an app for that.
Union Bank has partnered with Mutual Mobile, which helped develop Union’s mobile banking app, to produce a personal financial management app for kids. Development and testing took just nine weeks — quite a bit faster than banks usually develop products for adults.
Called Yuby, the app launched April 17 and will be marketed initially to Union Bank customers to use with their children. The app does not use real money, but has features like a chore list (and what kids will get paid for doing those chores), an activity log, which is a kind of transaction history, and a wish list.
The app’s target audience is 8-to-12 year-olds. When kids want to “cash out” and pull some money from their Yuby accounts, they go to the bank of mom and dad. Use of the app is meant to be a communal experience, to bring parents and kids together to talk about money.
The app, though visual, does not feature the graphs and charts one might expect from an adult PFM tool. “The kids we were targeting did not have a good grasp of what graphs meant and how they were used,” said Tarun Nimmagadda, CEO of Mutual Mobile.
Financial literacy — and the lack thereof — is certainly a pressing problem for young people. It’s possible to graduate from college with six figures of debt and no understanding of how to manage one’s financial life in order to pay the debt back.
A starter mobile app like this that brings parents and kids together seems like a good idea. But can the kid send an alert to mom’s mobile app with an invoice for his allowance? Now that would be an innovation.
UnionBanCal Corporation, the holding company of Union Bank, N.A., has about $106 billion in assets.