Investment/savings app Acorns has acquired GoHenry, a U.K. money management platform for younger consumers.
“All kids around the world deserve access to responsible money management tools and financial education,” Acorns CEO Noah Kerner said in a news release Monday (April 3).
“GoHenry’s mission driven approach is perfectly aligned with Acorns, which we expect will help us accelerate our roadmap and deliver financial wellness to the whole family through all of life’s stages,” added Kerner.
The company says the purchase — no price was given — marks an acceleration of Acorns’ goals by providing children and teenagers around the world with tools for money management and education.
According to the release, Acorns has helped consumers save and invest over $16 billion since its founding, while GoHenry’s young customers have saved $130 million in the last five years. Together, the two firms have nearly 6 million subscribers.
As noted here earlier this year, the amount of younger Britons seeking help to manage their debt has soared in recent years, with the number of young people in the U.K. seeking help from the Financial Ombudsman Service with loans, overdrafts and credit card debt jumping by more than 200%.
The answer to what’s driving this trend, PYMNTS wrote, could lie in a survey commissioned by the Centre for Social Justice (CSJ) and the debt collection agency Lowell showing that 68% of young people in the U.K. reported that a lack of money management skills is a crucial factor in driving them into debt.
And research conducted by GoHenry, in partnership with Censuswide and Development Economics, showed that people who didn’t receive financial education as children are now more likely to find themselves in debt because of missed payments.
The study noted that 79% of adults who didn’t receive financial education have fallen behind on utility bills or council tax payments over the previous six months. They are also more likely to be unemployed or earning less than the national average wage.
That isn’t to say the situation is much better in the U.S. As PYMNTS noted last year, a study by FINRA, the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority found that only a small fraction of Americans demonstrated basic financial literacy.
Fourteen years ago, the average person who took FINRA’s financial literacy survey could answer three out of five questions.
In the latest survey, the number had dropped to 2.6 questions, with only 4% of respondents able to find the right answer to all five questions.
As PYMNTS wrote, those “numbers have real-life implications as consumers deal with record inflation, forcing them to stretch their dollars and scramble to rework household budgets.”
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