Designing financial services for children with Sunshine+Kittens

Written by Dave Wallace
24th May 2024

As a fintech enthusiast, I keep my eyes open for ground-breaking ideas.

Improving financial literacy and our relationship with money is essential

I look for innovators who obsess about a problem they have seen or experienced and fuse this with the latest technologies and trends to create new customer propositions that deliver something different.

My vigilance is sometimes rewarded.

I recently sat down with the team behind a new venture called Sunshine+Kittens, which is taking a new approach to an old problem exacerbated by digital technology.

Financial literacy and our relationship with money are becoming more problematic.

From the moment our conscious life begins, what most people learn about money and finance can be written on the back of a small envelope. There is little, if any, formal education at school. This lack of education means that people learn by trial and error and snatched moments of education from family and friends.

As money has moved from analogue to digital, this problem has worsened. Very few children benefit from real money dropping into real piggy banks. Increasingly, children will have zero experience with physical cash, which used to be crucial to understanding the value and management of money.

It is an issue I ponder but have done nothing about.

However, the founders of Sunshine+Kittens, Charles O’Neil and Paul Jason, are fathers with young children who are busy launching a service to address these issues. They worry about the problems I have outlined above and believe that finance is getting increasingly complex.

Charles and Paul had many conversations about the issue, trying to identify and summarise the problem statement in a brief to themselves. For most, that’s where the process would have stopped—nice chats over beers.

But in a chance conversation, Charles’s son introduced the duo to a name: Sunshine+Kittens. This quirky name turned out to be the key that suddenly unlocked everything for the duo.

As often happens in a creative process, an insight or creative thought can mean everything suddenly drops into place. The name gave shape to the conversations, and Charles and Paul decided to launch a finance app targeted at children that was laser-focused on the educational aspect of the experience.

Sunshine+Kittens’ founding principle is “helping kids have better life outcomes”

They were joined by some others, including Jonty Nuttall, a technologist with vast knowledge of natural language platforms and AI, and Jake Lunt Davies, a designer with a long, distinguished career in the Star Wars universe, whose designs include the beautiful and iconic BB8.

Looking at the competition, they felt what was on offer looked like traditional banking simplified for children. These bank standard transactional interfaces lacked the critical things they felt were needed: an exciting interface, AI-served content and interactivity, with hyper-personalised features for each child designed to bring them back repeatedly. From what they could see on the various review sites and in the research they undertook, while parents seemed to like the control, the kids responded: Meh!

They decided that creativity and technology would be at the heart of the experience. Jake was tasked with designing a character that could be personalised to each customer and act as a guide, mentor, and springboard into the world of Sunshine+Kittens. Obviously, an account has to be set up and administered by a parent or guardian, but it’s there to support the user’s journey to money wisdom.

With a background in digital product design and user experience, Paul told me how the team began by focusing on what would encourage kids to engage and return to learn.

“With the current fintech solutions offering little more than a veneer of kids-centric appeal, we focused on placing the child central to every design decision and function within S+K. We have an aggressive and long product roadmap to achieve one of our founding principles: helping kids have better life outcomes,” he says.

Key features of the service include:

A vibrant interface: The interface is designed with the child at heart. Visually appealing, relevant, and designed to capture their imagination, it has been inspired by the likes of Teen Titans and Spider-Man into the Spiderverse.
Rewards system: Incentives for completing chores and homework will be a feature. Parents can set tasks and children can earn rewards, fostering a sense of responsibility and accomplishment.
Interactive learning: The app will include tasks and challenges delivered creatively, including helping children learn entrepreneurial skills.
Personalised experiences: Using AI, the app will offer a personalised curriculum tailored to each child’s learning style and pace, ensuring that every child gets the most out of their interactions with the app.

Charles says, “We are well into the development of the UI and back end, along with a key partner, SaaScada. We have a growing number of potential customers signed up, and we will be announcing a launch date in the next couple of months.”

He cites SaaScada’s strong core banking credentials, flexibility, and real-time data features as crucial reasons for its selection. Charles has a history of running compliance technology programmes for a global investment bank, so needless to say, the app is being built with compliance top of mind.

I asked about research with their target audience. It’s easy to get carried away by ideas (no dancing dads and all that). The target audience’s opinion matters. They have developed a panel in conjunction with local primary schools and found that children love it.

When talking to the team, the sense of higher purpose is evident—the genuine desire to do something good. They know that rehashing traditional ways of doing things won’t cut it with this digital-native younger audience. It has to be done differently.

Charles and his team are committed to making a social impact by improving financial literacy and addressing financial inequality.

Jonty highlights the potential dangers of financial products such as buy now, pay layer (BNPL). Without proper understanding, these can lead to significant phantom debt and financial mismanagement issues for young people.

It’s fantastic to see fintechs such as Sunshine+Kittens aiming to equip children with the knowledge and tools to navigate these challenges effectively. And it’s great to see they started with a creative idea, not the balance screen of a bank account.

About the author

Dave Wallace is a user experience and marketing professional who has spent the last 30 years helping financial services companies design, launch and evolve digital customer experiences.