Product Problem or Content Problem? What a Bank's Youngest Customers Told Me
The most useful thing a teenager told me about banking had nothing to do with managing money. The same scene kept coming up. They would be out with friends and run out of money. Their account was one of those kids' pocket-money apps where a parent makes weekly deposits and approves ad-hoc top-up requests. They’d message their parents and wait. Their evening would typically carry on with friends paying their share of the bill, and them making reimbursements a day or so later.
I hadn't gone looking for that insight. I'd gone looking for proof that “young people” wanted their bank to teach them about money.
I was wrong, and being wrong handed me the question every strategist should ask before anyone commissions a single video or article: is this a product problem or content problem?
At the time, I was consulting a large German retail bank. During a visioning workshop, the CEO and her executive team told me they wanted to become a full-service bank for Gen Z. “There from day 1, a financial companion for life”. The ambition was to help young people become more financially stable by getting them to start investing earlier. Everyone in the room could picture it.
Client data added a nudge. People in their late teens and early twenties appeared to be opening accounts steadily. The account was free, which explained the attraction, but their activity often stagnated. A spreadsheet couldn't tell me the rest, so I looked into it.
Product problem or content problem?
I decided to interview people between the ages of eleven and twenty-one. Participants were my neighbours' children, my friends' children, their friends, and some students I met at the gym. Some banked with my client; others banked with competitors.
Nothing formal, just conversations, with one hypothesis my client was quietly rooting for: that they all wanted more financial education, and that the bank should provide it.
I chose qualitative interviews because people describe behaviour better than they describe wants. Ask a teenager what they want from a bank, and you get a polite guess. Ask about the last time they ran out of money, and you get a story.
Many said and confirmed they were keen to save and learn about investing despite being cash poor, but they would “never look to the bank for education”. Not any bank, in fact. They used YouTube and TikTok, and favoured independent financial content creators with no endorsement deals and nothing to sell.
My research study revealed four personas
Young children, for whom kids' banking apps worked well: small pocket money deposits, spent monthly.
Teens who'd outgrown kids’ banking apps and often requested weekly money top-ups.
Students who moved abroad and stopped using the bank.
International students arriving in Germany who needed a legitimate blocked account for their visa.
Early into interviews, I realised the barrier to investment wasn’t a lack of educational content; it was a life-stage or product problem.
Younger children under fifteen focused on short-term savings targets and lacked any real motivation to squirrel money away long-term. They saved up for clothing, phones, or concert tickets, but faced no social or practical pressure for larger goals, and higher education remained too distant to feel relevant. Gap: lifestage.
Teens needed money the moment they needed it, but parental control was the blocker. The kids’ product offered an approval-and-deposit flow that often left them waiting to buy or pay. Gap: the product.
The over-eighteens who’d opened an account in Germany and moved abroad to study stopped using the bank largely because it didn’t suit cross-border living. They switched to fintechs like Revolut so they could easily split bills, pay back housemates and friends who'd covered dinner, get service discounts, avoid money exchange fees when travelling and begin micro-investing. Their original bank was too rigid. Gap: the product.
Lastly, international students who’d moved to Germany. Their barrier to using the account they’d opened was language. Gap: technically content, but actually the product, because for these customers a multilingual interface is the product. The bank provided information only in German. Product advertisements and emails were often written in a novelty brand voice that automatic translation tools struggled to interpret. And some content was presented as static images, which translation tools couldn't parse at all.
The part nobody enjoys
I took all these findings to my client. They weren't sugar-coated. My recommendations were clear and honest:
Children below the age of 14 had little motivation to save for the long term
Teens needed instant approval and friend-to-friend payback features
Young adults needed a product that worked across borders without fees
International students needed transaction, savings and investing information available in different languages, with English as a minimum
And all of this needed engineering time, cross-team buy-in and a localisation budget.
Unfortunately, the content needed none of those, so the client set the findings aside and instead commissioned YouTube videos and kids' money-management cartoons. I understand the pull. The investing content matched the CEO's ambition; it shipped quickly, and nobody had to fight for a roadmap slot. I suspect the pressure to show progress played its part too.
But surprise, surprise, the content got little engagement. The bank explained investing to people who'd explicitly said they didn’t want to learn from a bank, and it didn’t perform. Nothing was done to improve the banking product for teenagers and young adults, even though they have daily transactional behaviours, saving goals, part-time jobs, and loans.
A few months later, the fintech banks my client aspired to be like all launched teen-specific account offerings tackling the exact inconveniences I had cited. I won't claim that proves everything, and I've no idea whether anyone read my notes beyond the executives I presented to. But it told me the gap was real, and that someone else was going to fill it.
The bank had something fintech challengers didn't.
The saddest part is that my client, the retail bank, had, and still has, the ability to serve a person from their first pocket-money account to their pension deposit, with trust already banked at every life stage under one roof.
The teenager waiting for their parent's approval is the customer a bank should want at fifteen, at twenty-five, and all the way through to retirement age.
Product problem or content problem isn't a philosophical question. It's a question about which of your customers you're willing to build something for. They told me plainly what it would take to keep them, and it wasn't a YouTube video.
Many strategists reading this have likely navigated comparable hurdles - to a degree, it simply comes with the territory. You can present clear evidence, but you cannot force a decision-maker to act upon it. Reflecting on the experience, if I had wanted to push harder, I could have shared direct audio recordings of those interviews and paired every key insight with its estimated cost and corresponding gap. That way, low-cost shortcuts couldn't masquerade as genuine solutions, making the research far harder to set aside.
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