Tweens and teens, mercurial denizens of the twilight zone, come packaged with a crucial special instruction—handle with care. Including matters of money. Especially matters of money. It’s an instruction ignored at one’s own peril. For parents and guardians, it’s a conundrum at many levels. Should they give their 11-18 year olds pocket money? How much? How? When? Should they monitor the spending? When should the purse strings be loosened? Or tightened? No right or wrong answers here. Families discover their own equilibrium, through trial and error. To improvise Tolstoy’s famous quote, every family is unique in its own way, a startup that helps families navigate this tricky intersection of young people and money. Three-year-old FamPay offers Gen-Z and Gen-Alpha folks the financial autonomy they seek. It does this with pocket-money smart cards—essentially app-based prepaid cards that come with UPI IDs too. New-tech but with a simple-enough premise. Parents load money—up to Rs 10,000 a month—on these cards, and kids spend it as they like. There are nudges to save too, with reward points and such. From the design to the features to the marketing, the teenage-target audience is kept up, front, and centre. This differentiator compared to offerings by a few banks seems to have clicked: the app has over 10 million downloads on Google Play Store. But does convenience come at a cost? Is the card leading to increased spending? Will it lead to increased borrowings in the future? For FamPay, is there even a viable business model?
