As children, we were all given pocket money to some level or another. Whether it was a little here for sweets, or even enough to buy something substantial like a DVD every month, our parents controlled our wallets with tighter fingers than Gollum on Sauron’s One Ring (guess which office finally got around to seeing The Hobbit?).
What we were given was ours to spend on whatever we could afford in the real, physical world, but times have changed since we were young. In our childhoods, there were no Smartphones and Tablets, nor apps, app stores, app developers, or indeed any hints of what the mobile computing world was going to become at the end of the 2000s. We now live in an age where everything children want (including sweets) can be bought off the internet, and some things like apps can’t be bought anywhere else.
So how do parents in this modern age solve the problem of managing their child’s finances when everything they want is online at their fingertips through a tablet, phone or computer?
Would it be irresponsible for a parent to, say, set-up a child with a PayPal account that only contains money put there by the parent? How about allowing the child their own account on iTunes or Google Play, where, again, the amount they have to spend is controlled by the parent, but the children are in complete control of where the money that they have available goes.
Indeed, with the world moving further and further away from traditional paper banking to digital and then from digital to mobile, it is a valuable lesson for any child to learn that money they spend online is just as real as the money they hand over in a shop. It would also allow them to make real financial mistakes (if tiny ones) within the enclosed pace of the app development world. For example, if a child spent all their money on shiny add-ons for a gaming app they have on their tablet, that’s all they’ve got for this month already gone.
There isn’t a definitive answer for this dilemma, as parents will be raising kids into a world the parents never knew growing up. Technology, especially the easy to use and easy to learn mobile technology of today has given the younger generations unprecedented access to the internet and all its wonders that even their older siblings never experienced. With that wealth of knowledge and potential places to be and things to do, the management of a child’s finances has become harder than simply handing them some cash and off they went.
Now you can buy apps for $0.99, or roughly the price of a candy bar. You can rent movies from iTunes for less than half the price of a DVD and Netflix is always there if you can’t track something down. The new generation is already familiar with this dynamic of digital media, but they are also being raised into a world where putting a price on digital media is a very difficult thing, and nearly every computer literate adult and child out there knows how to pirate things they want.
How do you teach a child about financial responsibility when they don’t even need to pay for the things they want any more? When the digital culture they grew up in instilled in them the idea that essentially all digital content is worthless, how do the parents of now keep the new generations informed of how to handle finances and purchases in the mobile digital world?
At Kumulos (Backend as a Service) we think that these questions are important, even if on the surface they seem trivial. The rising generations are the ones whose lives have, so far as they’re concerned, always had Smartphones, tablets, Smart TV and near universal broadband connections. They will be the ones who begin to shape the mobile and technology world as the Smartphone era moves towards its first 10 years. The children of today are the leaders and workers of tomorrow.
This is why we think that the solution to the problem of children’s spending in the mobile world now is linked to the problem of corporate expenses now. Imagine using NFC technology to preload a corporate phone with a certain amount of credit that the employee can then use for job related expenses whilst the phone keeps track of everything that goes through it. It would streamline a usually paperwork heavy part of a big corporation into a system that receives the receipt data from the purchases and logs them all immediately.
This is a dilemma and problem that more and more parents are going to be facing as the mobile world continues its inexorable push into our lives. With every child at least having access to (perhaps not owning) a smartphone or tablet, they may be the ones to push digital wallet technology to the point where it becomes necessary to adopt it not as a luxury but as a standard mode of payment.
And with that change there are going to be apps needed to support them, which is where you, the app developers come in. You have so many chances right now in this area to create something that parents can use to organise their children’s online wallets, all the whilst paving the way for NFC and digital wallets to be comes a “thing” officially, or at least culturally.
