Making finance fun: Playful affordances and gamified interface designs in children’s FinTech apps

Children’s FinTech apps are digital mobile platforms that incorporate features for managing children’s financial activities ranging from the setting and tracking of chores, the payment of allowances or pocket money, the capacity for saving and spending, and the facilitation of investment options. As we show in this paper, a key aspect of these child money and finance apps is the inclusion of playful affordances such as gamified interface designs and elements that aim to make financial activities fun and appealing to younger users. In doing so, we build on emerging research on children’s FinTech to identify and discuss key implications of playful finance in children’s app environments. Methodologically, the paper draws on established app walkthrough and interface design feature analysis methods, as well as a case study approach from app studies, which are applied to children’s financial app platforms. We identify various playful affordances such as gamified designs and app features in three case study examples where children are incentivised to complete chores, document their savings goals, embrace debit cards and digital consumption, or learn about money and finances through digital rewards such as points, tokens, or levels. Through the interface design analysis, we find that children’s finance apps encourage regular input and collection of their economic activity and information, build attachments to platforms through personalised branding and the accrual of valued in-app assets and status, and instruct children in norms of both digital finance and data surveillance.