Making Financial Literacy Fun for Children

Goalsetter helps prepare youth for financial success

According to a 2021 Capital One CreditWise survey, 73% of Americans rank their finances as their No. 1 cause of stress. “We spend billions of dollars as an industry trying to improve financial outcomes, but people are more stressed than ever about money,” said Tanya Van Court, Founder and CEO of Goalsetter, a company helping change the way that parents and children save and grow money.

In a recent podcast, Van Court discussed how her experience as a senior executive for ESPN and Nickelodeon led her down a very different path – to creating an app that teaches children financial literacy, economic concepts and principles of financial health in a fun, compelling way using games, memes and pop culture.

Goalsetter provides a teen debit card as part of its program. “Our debit card comes with a groundbreaking rule that no one else in the industry has: ‘Learn Before You Burn.’ As a parent, you can automatically freeze your kid's debit card on Sunday morning if they haven't taken their financial literacy quiz for the week,” she said.

“We're making sure that, when these kids leave the house, they are financially fluent and know the terms our generation never knew until we were 35 years old and taught ourselves,” she added.

Goalsetter was the winner of the 2022 FinTech Breakthrough Award for Best Personal Finance Product. Fiserv and Goalsetter are partnering to bring tailored financial services to the K-12 youth market. The app is available on the Fiserv AppMarket and as a white label solution for financial institutions.

Van Court believes financial institutions can play a critical role in children’s financial education, and that Goalsetter provides a way to engage and excite these future accountholders.

“Financial institutions need to be in the forefront of this,” she said. “You can provide a youth banking solution and a youth financial education solution and make kids your next generation of consumers and customers.”