Cashless era: Relying on Commonwealth Bank of Australia digital financial technology to enlighten financial awareness for children

Studies have shown that the enlightenment period for children’s financial education is 3-5 years, and the critical period is 5-12 years. During this period, parents were the primary financial enlightenment teacher for the child. However, through the continuous improvement of the mobile payment industry ecosystem, China has become the world’s largest mobile payment market and is beginning to gradually transition to a cashless society. The new generation of children will no longer be able to recognize "money" through visible and tangible banknotes and coins. So, how should parents properly guide children to understand "money"?

In response to this problem, ASB, bank of Commonwealth Bank of Australia, has developed the world’s first cashless smart money bank "Clever Kash". It is an intelligent child financial product combining software and hardware. Parents can use mobile apps to connect with their children’s "Clever Kash", and educate children to develop good saving habits by giving their children change and setting savings goals.

Today, this technology of Commonwealth Bank of Australia was introduced to mainland China by Taodi Children’s Finance, together with Changsha Bank, aim to carry out a comprehensive localization upgrade to meet the needs and preferences of Chinese users and provide richer and more interesting financial products for Chinese families. The interactive experience helps parents to more easily guide their children to establish a correct outlook on money, cultivate children’s "financial quotient" from an early age, and integrate financial management and enlightenment education into their daily lives.

Insights into needs of children aged 3-12: The combination of fun and motivation

From the very beginning of the project “Happy Baby Elephant”, we began to have in-depth communication with Changsha Bank to help analyze market needs and trends. After the release of Happy Baby Elephant 1.0, we conducted in-depth research and insights on core users based on the collected feedback data.

We visited Changsha, Loudi, Xingcheng, and Wangcheng, conducted in-depth interviews and usability tests on 12 groups of users (parents + children). Through the analysis of a large number of survey data, we found that younger children (3-5.5 years old) are very sensitive to interesting voice interactions, but their understanding of "money" is still vague, and elephants are more like children Playmate. Older children (5.5-12 years old) started to have a preliminary understanding of money, more concerned about how to use the money in baby elephants, and asked parents to send more tasks in order to earn more pocket money. Parents are also happy to set up tasks for their children and educate children that money is created through labor. Not only can they establish a correct outlook on the child’s money, they can also use it to cultivate children’s life skills and hobbies.

On the basis of the above research results, we further combed out the pyramid demand model for children aged 3-12:

Based on the above research and analysis results, a clear design goal was established for the baby elephant, so that children can have an emotional connection with the baby elephant in a more interesting and emotional interaction form, and through rich incentives and task plans, parents can accompany child and learn together step by step.

Happy Elephant, Comprehensive upgrade of software and hardware, create China’s localized financial experience

In order to meet the needs of Chinese children for more fun and incentives, we have added localized functional modules for the happy baby elephant on the basis of retaining the two core functions of “Spend Money” and “Saving Goals” of Clever Kash, building a brand new Information architecture from the perspective of children to create more interesting forms of interaction and motivation.

| Voice Interaction：

In order to meet the needs of children under 5.5 who want to interact with the baby elephant, we have equipped a voice interaction system on the baby elephant. According to the first requirement in the pyramid model, we hope that voice interaction can bring an interesting communication experience to children. To this end, we have designed a set of language expression interaction systems for children. With friendly words, lively voices, and happy voice intonations, so that the elephants can establish a close emotional connection with children and become children’s growth partners.

| Grow up Plan：

According to the pyramid model, we combined the three major needs of incentives, parental companions, and task rewards to create a set of incentive mechanisms for baby elephants-the "growth plan". Parents only need to arrange three types of tasks: "financial management", "loving to learn" and "hands-on" on the mobile APP, and send them to the elephant to remind the child. After the child completes the task, they can win medal rewards and earn extra pocket money. This can cultivate children’s awareness of financial management, enhance learning motivation, improve life skills, and promote communication between children and parents. Moreover, for the children who want to earn more pocket money, we also set up the function of "application for tasks", so that children can easily and directly express their desire to get more tasks to parents.

| Payment function：

According to the pyramid model, when a child reaches 5.5 years of age, he begins to develop an initial sense of money and develops the need to understand "money" in a realistic use scenario. At this time, we must not only cultivate their saving habits, but also exercise their ability to reasonably control their pocket money. To this end, we have added a payment function for baby elephants so that children can display QR codes to pay for goods on stores. In the process of buying, children can understand the role of "money" and start to think about how to balance savings and consumption and how to control money in an optimal way. We have added a payment function to form a closed loop of the entire incentive mechanism, so that children can enjoy more motivation to do tasks after enjoying the fruits of their labor.

| Visual Language：

We want to incorporate "interestingness" into the elephant’s overall visual language. After rigorous consideration, we have determined the visual style combining quasi-materialization and flattening to take into account the visual preferences, recognizability and overall aesthetic trends of children aged 3-12. On the basis of the bright color tone with certain tension and appeal, adding lively motion effects as embellishments, creating a complete interface visual system for the baby elephant.

In order to optimize the product experience for the user group of children, we also reorganized the functional framework of Baby Elephant, reducing the level of information architecture as much as possible, compressing all task operations to no more than 3 levels and reducing children’s learning costs. In addition, we try to reduce the intererence of information in each interface as much as possible, so that children can focus on one thing one on one screen, reducing the difficulty of operation. At the same time, in order to ensure that the effects of voice interaction and screen interaction are optimally presented, we continue to discuss the possibility of hardware upgrades with elephants, upgrade LED touch screens, optimize speaker sound quality, and increase memory. After repeated test iterations, The user experience in all aspects is enhanced to the extreme. 

As a highly professional children’s financial product, "Happy Baby Elephant" has made a subversive huge breakthrough in the field of children’s financial education. It intelligently combines the intelligent technology of children’s toy image, voice interaction and touch screen interaction to create new financial product experience and provides a complete solution for enlightenment of children’s financial education.

Relying on the professionalism and security of Digital Finance of the Commonwealth Bank of Australia, the smart money box will be promoted to the Chinese mainland market on a larger scale. In the future, Happy Elephant will meet Chinese children through more banking platforms, with updated images, more complete software and hardware, and richer experiences, to accompany them to learn the first financial lesson in life.