How Greenlight Helps Parents Engage Their Children Financially

Benzinga will be holding its annual Benzinga Global Fintech Awards, a day of dealmaking, networking, and recognition in the financial technology space, on Nov. 10, 2020.

In recognition of those disruptive innovators creating positive and diverse change within the financial services space, Benzinga chatted with Tim Sheehan, CEO and co-founder at Greenlight.

About Greenlight

In today’s connected world, parents demand solutions that engage their children financially.

Founded in 2017, Greenlight is a fintech empowering parents to raise financially-smart kids. The company is a pioneer in the financial literacy space, delivering financial education, saving, and investing tools for kids.

In the simplest way possible: Greenlight helps kids build long-term wealth.

“Our mission is to help parents raise financially smart kids,” said Sheehan. “That means helping them form financially healthy habits they can take with them into adulthood.”

Core Product Portfolio

Greenlight comes as a multi-pronged solution allowing kids to save, spend and invest. The company’s core products include a debit card and fractional investing with parental control functionality, as well as tools that enable parents to track chores and deliver allowances.

The entire product portfolio can be characterized by the following:

• Spending: Debit card that allows parents to control and supervise spending.
• Savings: Intuitive interest-earning savings account with built-in incentives.
• Giving: Families can teach their kids to give back to charities and nonprofits.
• Investing: Kids can learn the markets and invest fractionally, if parents allow.

“With the built-in investment account that is about to roll out, kids can learn how to invest, research companies and ETFs, and then propose investments to their parents,” said Sheehan. “Overall, it’s a service to try to help kids learn all of the things that parents would want them to learn within the personal finance category.”

Use Case, Recent Developments

In light of the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic, consumer finances became stretched, increasing the need for tools that incent responsible financial practices.

As a result, Greenlight amped up its efforts around investing, given the unprecedented opportunity available in financial markets, to help kids begin to build wealth, sooner. The most recent additions to the investing tool include the addition of research, education, and analysis functionality for listed stocks and ETFs.

“We also launched Round Ups where kids can automatically round up purchases to the next dollar and put it into their savings accounts.”

Innovation Outlook

“Our mission is our biggest differentiator.”

Going forward, Greenlight aims to lean on its core competencies in providing new and intuitive tools that enable kids to learn by doing.

“We’re big believers in having them learn by doing so they’re actually learning while they are making trade-off decisions -- spend versus save -- on how to allocate their money.”

To learn more about Greenlight, click here.