Teenagers. Who knows what they want? They do…

Guest blog post by Harrison Roberts (currently doing work experience at FStech)

Teenagers often read articles written by experts, who are a few decades away from the people they are supposedly representing, about what they want from their banks. Maybe these experts know what they’re talking about (to be fair they probably do) but the people that really know what teenagers are looking for are, quite obviously, teenagers.

So here we have it, a blog post about what teenagers want from banking, written by a teenager. Firstly I do not pretend to be expressing the thoughts of the entire teenage species, just my thoughts. A lot of people seem to believe that young people wish to have any and all information fired at them through social media such as Facebook or Twitter, however this is not entirely true in areas such as banking. I can see the idea; social media is a simple and easy way to contact a massive audience (average of over 4,000 followers for biggest banks) at no cost. However as a teenager, I would log on to Twitter to follow what various celebrities had for breakfast. I wouldn’t think of searching to see what Barclays’ most recent hashtag has been. Social media has its purpose, and that purpose isn’t banking.

Another common misconception is that if a teenager cannot do whatever it is they want to do on their phone, then they simply will not do it. Mobile banking is very useful and is becoming a necessity in the modern world. According to an online and mobile banking report by Online Financial Innovations, “We are almost at the peak of online access, with just one million new online households added last year, the fewest annual total since internet banking came on the scene in 1995. The growth going forward will almost all be on the mobile front.”

Despite this, I do feel that face-to-face, ‘in-store’ meetings with an actual human can often be just as, if not more, helpful and convenient as using your mobile or PC. Perhaps the use of technologies like kiosks or even iPads in branches would reinvigorate branch banking and would stop in their tracks those who say that the end is nigh for the High Street?