Greenlight CEO Tim Sheehan joins Yahoo Finance Live to discuss financial literacy content for kids and how to make personal finance more accessible through games and other media.
Video transcript
[AUDIO LOGO]
RACHELLE AKUFFO: Very well. Well, fintech startup Greenlight is on a mission to empower parents to teach their kids about money management. The company offers children’s debit cards that allow parents to set flexible controls over their children’s financial activity. Kids invested over $13 million in 2022 using Greenlight and saved over $160 million.
Joining us now is Greenlight CEO Tim Sheehan. Tim, thanks for joining me. So a lot of parents are wondering – you know, maybe they don’t have their own financial literacy on hand – how should they use that to really empower their kids to be better at managing their the money?
Tim Sheehan: Yeah, it really is a suite of tools. So if you have very young children, it helps them learn, you know, money doesn’t grow on trees. You have to work for it. You have to learn it. So there is built-in task tracking and allocations. It has savings goal tracking, so kids can learn how to save for a specific goal and kind of learn how to do it.
And then as kids get older there’s debit – there’s a debit card that comes with some sort of parental controls so parents can kind of help them learn to make trade-off decisions and spend their money. But there’s something about where, because it’s the kid’s money and because they have this property on it’s their debit card with their name on it, their behavior starts to change. They begin to learn how to make these trade-off decisions. It’s almost magical. It’s amazing to see this happen.
Kids can also learn how to invest, so they research ETFs like VOO or stocks like Amazon or Apple or whatever. And then they can offer the investment to their parent, and then the parent can ask them some questions.
For example, I’m going to ask my son, so why do you think you should invest in Visa? Where did you… or Nike? You know, what made you think it would be a good investment? And you have this conversation. And this is where the learning happens. And we include things like Morningstar Premium content, so kids get good, objective information to base their research on.
RACHELLE AKUFFO: And, Tim, you also mentioned Apple, Amazon, VOO. Talk about how they grow their money on the investment side first and then on the savings side.
Tim Sheehan: Yeah. Yeah. It’s really wonderful to see him. As anyone who watches this show probably knows, learning to invest at an early age and starting at an early age can have a huge impact on your life. And it definitely did for me. It’s something I was blessed to learn at a young age, and it helped transform my life.
I really try to do what my parents did for me. I try to help every parent do for their children and learn…help children learn to invest. Help them learn to make basic decisions between do I want to buy this thing right in front of me, or should I save my money and buy the thing I really want later?
We actually created this financial literacy content in a game. So one thing that is – it’s a bit of a shame, is that there’s a lot of fantastic financial literacy content out there. But children don’t… they don’t care. In fact, they don’t – and even most adults, frankly, aren’t interested in reading a bunch of dense information and learning it that way.
So what we did was we went from the K to 12 national standards for personal finance, and we hired our own experts and connected them with product designers, game designers and engineers. And we built this Level Up game which is just fantastic.
Basically, kids are playing a game. And by playing the game, they’re learning all the basics of personal finance but — but exceeding the K-12 national standards for personal finance. So basically, when a child completes Level Up, they will have – they will know everything that is covered by these K-12 national standards.
RACHELLE AKUFFO: I mean, it’s amazing because you’re also, as you mentioned there, partnering with the classrooms. But I want to ask you, obviously the expansion and you have this macroeconomic backdrop that has bad side effects. We know you had to lay off, over 100 people there, about 21% of your workforce there. Talk about those layoffs and the resulting decision.
Tim Sheehan: Yeah, that’s what you said, the macroeconomic environment, it’s tough, and it’s affecting all businesses. And Greenlight is no exception. So we just…we did what we had to do to keep serving our customers. We obviously are – our focus on our mission is absolutely the same, trying to help parents raise financially smart kids. But we’re just trying to navigate this difficult environment with really everyone, whether it’s another business or consumers also facing high inflation and so on.
So, yeah, we’re just trying to stay focused on Level Up, the game, on Greenlight for Classrooms, which we’re making available for free to every teacher in the country and every student in the country. So we always try to do the right things, but we also have to face the harsh reality of the current macroeconomic environment.
RACHELLE AKUFFO: In effect. Well, thank you for joining us. And the more financial literacy, the better. Tim Sheehan, CEO of Greenlight. Thanks for joining me this morning.