Digital WealthTech platforms have helped make it easy for everyone to get access to their finances. Whether it is a banking app that allows them to manage their money, a savings tool to track spending and set goals, or an investing platform that allows users to quickly build an investment portfolio. People can control their finances from the palm of their hand.
Not only has this made financial wellness more accessible, but it has also helped improve the visibility and accessibility. People no longer have to set up a meeting at the bank; they can quickly look online and get started.
This availability and visibility have helped more people get involved in their finances from an earlier age. A recent study from the World Economic Forum found that 30% of Gen Z began investing in university or early adulthood, compared to 15% of Millennials, 9% of Gen X and 6% of Baby Boomers.
With people taking a proactive approach to their financial wellness from an earlier age, it raises the questions of when education around investing and its risks should begin.
Fredrik Davéus, CEO and co-founder of Kidbrooke, believes that the education around investing should start early, but through financial reasoning and decision-making and then gradually evolve as they age. For instance, in early-childhood between the ages of five and eight, there should be a focus on concepts, such as value, trade-offs and saving for goals. “This stage builds the mindset needed for disciplined long-term thinking.”
When they are between nine and 13, they should be gradually introduced to concepts like inflation, risk vs reward, and the power of compounding. This would work best with real-world contexts as well as visual and interactive experiences. In their teen years, they will be able to handle more nuanced concepts, Davéus explained. This would be where they are taught about portfolio diversification, risk tolerance, behavioural biases, and why markets fluctuate. “Tools at this stage should provide personalised insights so young people can see how financial choices map to long-term outcomes.”
Finally, when they are in their early adulthood (18+) the education should become more practical. Education should link goals to actions, whether it is retirement, home ownership, education or business.
“Across all ages, the goal is to move from abstract teaching to personalised understanding. Financial guidance platforms can enable this by integrating analytics with user goals, making financial education contextual and relevant across life stages.”
This staged approach to financial education is one shared by others in the WealthTech space. Fincite CEO Friedhelm Schmitt also believes there should be a gradual education for younger people. He noted that at eight they should be learning to wait, fourteen it is about understanding and then 18 is about responsibility.
However, the most important reason for teaching people from an early age is to ensure they are not disillusioned by finfluencers on social media, Schmitt highlighted.
He said, “Across Europe, we are currently debating restrictions or even bans on social media for children in some countries. The reason is clear: concerns about distorted realities, instant gratification, and psychological pressure. But this debate is directly relevant to financial education.
“Social media often promotes the opposite of what long-term investing requires, immediate status, rapid wealth, consumption as identity. When a fourteen-year-old constantly sees peers supposedly getting rich overnight through digital assets or displaying luxury as the norm, patience is not rewarded, impatience is. And those early mental models don’t disappear. What we often hear from advisors is: panic selling during downturns, unrealistic return expectations, or living permanently at the financial edge. Consequences of lack of early financial education and financial experience.
“If we believe young people need protection from distorted digital environments, then we must also equip them with the tools to navigate financial reality.”
Geert Bernaerts, finance manager at everyoneINVESTED, is also a firm believer in teaching investing at a young age and in appropriate tones, such as stories. He noted that early childhood should primarily focus on basic concepts like saving, choice and delayed gratification, which introduces the time value of money, he explained.
During adolescence, children can start to be taught about risk, compounding and trade-offs between spending and investing, while in young adulthood they can start to get introduced to real capital markets, diversification and long-term strategy. “The goal is not to create mini traders, but to build financial intuition over time, and ultimately improve financial resilience.”
The digital saving bank
There have been several attempts at trying to get children involved in their finances. A common service is a pocket-money style solution that lets parents give money to their kids, whether as a regular amount or for rewards, such as completing chores. Others are designed to encourage children to save their money and put it away to save up for a future purchase.
However, while these tools are great ways to introduce children to money management concepts, such as saving, they lack the financial education to help them understand the benefits. Bernaerts noted, “Many youth focused investing apps promise financial education, but in practice function more like gamified savings jars. While sleek interfaces and parental dashboards have lowered barriers to entry, true learning often remains shallow. If children only see balances go up and down without understanding why, these tools risk reinforcing passivity rather than curiosity.”
Davéus shared a similar opinion. He noted, “Many products marketed to younger users are indeed enhanced piggy banks, they gamify saving or let users tuck away spare change but stop short of teaching why investing works.”
To become a truly educational tool for children, they need to explain outcomes, visualise long-term consequences and encourage reflection. This can include embedded contextual analytics, explanations for trade-offs and provide real-world scenarios that show projected outcomes.
Bernaerts explained, “Education happens not when money is digitized, but when cause and effect become visible. A supervisor once told us, “Even an experienced pilot risks crashing a plane in a gamified cockpit”.”
This gap between engagement and genuine education raises a broader question about how young investors can be protected as their exposure to financial markets grows. These apps aimed at children are exclusively focused on savings and do not teach them about concepts for investing. While they help a child learn to accumulate their money, it doesn’t explore how to deal with volatility, manage reactions during emotion spikes or stay consistent in uncertainty, Schmitt noted.
He said, “Many youth-focused tools are designed for daily engagement. They rely on gamification, activity loops, dopamine triggers, because digital products need relevance and retention. But investing demands the opposite. It rewards patience over activity, rules over impulse, context over excitement.
“The more ‘delightful’ and stimulating a product becomes, the further it can drift from the discipline that real investing requires. Engagement is good for apps. Inactivity is often good for portfolios.”
Ensuring protections
While teaching children about the benefits and risks of investing is important, there also needs to be a focus on protections. With many on social media platforms giving the false perception of instant rewards, it will be easy for many youths to jump in and take extreme risks.
Ensuring protection and encouraging investing is a balancing act. Davéus noted this comes down to intelligent design. “Shielding young people entirely from markets only delays learning but exposing them without guardrails invites unnecessary risk. The solution lies in graduated engagement supported by embedded analytics and clear transparency.”
Schmitt expressed a similar solution. “Balancing early investing exposure with safeguards is not about restriction but about progressive responsibility. We should not think in terms of allowed or forbidden, but in terms of stages. Just as we would not hand over car keys without training, we should not grant full financial freedom without behavioural preparation. The real safeguard is not limitation, it is a good architecture.”
In practice, this means increasing the user’s access and risk capacity in tandem with their demonstrated discipline. Schmitt describes this as “intelligent friction”, where moments help to slow down their impulsive decisions and reconnect them with long-term goals, rather than banning them from participation.
He said, “The objective is not to prevent young investors from ever experiencing loss. It is to protect them from structural mistakes while allowing supervised learning. Small, guided setbacks build competence. Large, avoidable errors destroy confidence.”
As part of the gradual access, risks should be introduced progressively through diversified portfolios and sensible defaults that prioritise long-term stability, Davéus explained. Safeguards should also be built into the digital architecture, he noted. For instance, behavioural analytics can identify patterns or excessive trading or concentration and trigger timely nudges or educational prompts. “Clear disclosure of risk metrics, cost structures and projected outcomes reinforces responsible decision-making while preserving autonomy.”
He added, “The objective is to scaffold participation. When technology acts as a structured guide, early investing becomes a controlled environment for building judgement and discipline.”
As for Bernaerts, he believes the best protection is by building trust with the child. “Early exposure should never mean early exploitation. Safeguards are not a brake on education, but a prerequisite for trust.” Achieving this requires placing limits on risk, implementing separation between learning and speculation and implementing strong consumer protection by design.
“When adolescents are encouraged to reflect on how they respond to gains and losses, they are far less likely to overestimate their comfort with risk later on. Products for young investors should default to diversification, long time horizons and transparent costs, with complexity introduced gradually rather than abruptly.”
The right mentality
When it comes to finding the right mentality to teach children, there was a consensus on what that looks like – patience.
For Schmitt, this means tackling the skill of frustration tolerance. “Investing is delayed gratification under uncertainty. You commit capital today without knowing the exact outcome tomorrow. That requires emotional stability, not excitement.”
As such, software providers have a role to play in helping encourage responsible investing through the design of their services. He added, “As software providers, we shape behaviour. If real-time performance is front and centre, action bias rises. If goals, progress, and rules are emphasized, behaviour stabilizes. User interfaces are not neutral, they educate, whether we intend them to or not. If you design for excitement, you get trading. If you design for discipline, you get investing. That is our responsibility as WealthTech software providers.”
Looking ahead to the future
Children are growing up with technology as a part of their every day. This has a great opportunity for wealth management firms to support investing education.
In an ideal world, Bernaerts would like to see this becoming an ecosystem that is not just reliant on a single app or financial institution. Instead, schools would provide financial literacy support, governments would enable participation through smart policy and then financial institutions would offer a platform to support the child based on their age. Parents and guardians would then serve as guides and not gatekeepers, with tools that can encourage conversations around investing.
He added, “Diagnostic tools, such as financial personality or risk profiling assessments, become a normal part of financial education, not something reserved for adults opening their first portfolio. Technology will play a key role, but largely in the background, personalizing education, automating safeguards and translating complexity into clarity.”
Over the next five to ten years, Davéus believes youth investing will sit within a fully integrated financial wellbeing ecosystem that moves with the individual. The investing journey will have an education embedded and offer insights that grow in sophistication as the user matures.
He added, “We already know that the next generation expects transparency and context. Platforms will need to explain outcomes clearly; why markets move, how risk is being managed, and what decisions mean in relation to long-term goals. The winning model will combine advanced analytics with intuitive design, translating complexity into clarity without oversimplifying the underlying realities of risk.”
In this future, Davéus expects AI will act as an important interpreter. Natural language interfaces will help users understand topics such as volatility, diversification and long-term projections, and humans will be there to offer additional support and guidance. He added, “The ideal ecosystem will provide structured, explainable pathways that guide young people from financial curiosity to informed, goal-driven decision-making.”
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