Description:

It’s 2022. Cash isn’t king. Crypto’s confusing. Don’t even ask about the cost of living. How do you prepare kids for a financial future that’s beyond imagination?

Kit is a money app for kids and their grown-ups to use together. Supported by CommBank and currently in its beta form, Kit wants to help young people do more with money. While the concept of introducing kids to money at a young age isn’t new, doing so in an integrated app that’s educational, playful, and has an embedded intelligent agent is. So, Kit needed a brand that kids actually want to interact with. And, with the average kid spending almost 20hrs online a week, one that grown-ups can trust.

Working collaboratively with x15 and CommBank, we surveyed 5-16year olds to find out what they know and think about money. What we learned is that kids are motivated by what they want and what they want can be super random. In the same breath, they want Maxibons, a mansion, and to ‘make it rain’. Using the survey responses as a jumping off point, we developed the brand to be exuberant and quirky to ensure kids were excited to enter Kit’s universe. This led to our brand idea of ‘kids walking in a grown-up’s world’.
Between ourselves, CommBank and the x15 ventures team building Kit, there was a collective keenness for deep collaboration on this project. The app itself was being built in parallel to us building the brand, giving us the opportunity to directly influence Kit’s user interface and user journey. By co-creating in Figma and through discussions over Slack, we were able to uncover the best possible moments to inject our unique personality into the experience.

The Kit app does more than just make financial education fun –it enables kids and grown-ups to learn together. Kit engaged behavioral scientists to conduct an independent literature review of research evidence behind the core features, such as savings stacks and PayDay. Just-in-time ‘nudges’ that drive positive financial behaviours have been implemented in the Kit app, such as goal visualisation and sharing achievements which make it more likely for kids to commit to goals and reach them.

Kit is designed to be simple, visual and customisable so kids can use it, Earnit, Stackit, Spendit and most importantly, Learnit their way. The inclusive design gives kids more autonomy and ownership over their money journey. Kit considers their evolving capabilities – from visually representing savings to kid-friendly conversations in-app, it’s truly a kid-fits app.