It has been a decade since a great recession, still, millennials are dicey about the financial investment. Even after the emergence of a safe economy, some of them, who already have experience in the financial market, opt to stay away from it. Researchers at Dellolite say “the young professionals today have a general distrust in financial institutions, which is no wonder. This is because most of them just graduated colleges at the age when the financial crisis occurred and they entered into an environment of job-scarce”.
Millennials need a proper channel which can help them to know in-and-out of the financial world. They need a platform which can guide and drive them towards financial investment. Startups, in this regards, are playing a crucial role.
As per recent studies, we have seen that the young professionals in their 20s and 30s have a good amount of disposable income. This encourages the new investment startups like Robinhood, Stash, Cadre, Betterment, Wealthfront, and Ellevest to earn the trust of the millennials. They create less advertisement and easy interface to make the complete process of financial investment simpler. And this how they aim to directly reach to millennials and create awareness among them.
Startups: creating different opportunities
As millennials are dispassionate about financial investment, they are unaware of the right way of doing it. Their struggling part is: from where they should start, when to start, and to whom they should trust for financial investment. These fundamental questions have given rise to the countless financial startups like Morning Brew, Grow, and Cheddar — focusing to educate millennials about the basic financial concepts and gain their trust.
Alex Lieberman, co-founder of Morning Brew says “Our generation is extremely interested in business and finance, but they feel like there has never been more clutter”. Morning Brew’s, in this regards, spread awareness about the financial sector among millennials by publishing contents which include updates on cryptocurrency, evaluation on companies like Juul, and the chronicles of Tesla’s Elon Musk.
Jennifer Barrett believes that in the financial world, it is very important to understand the concept of “money”. Hence, to untangle the financial world and spread the knowledge money she started Grow. But, unlike Morning Brew, who delivers daily finance news, Grow focuses on finance-wellness by acting as an actual investment tool. Barrett says “the goal is to break down concepts like the Federal Reserve or interest rates, which she believes are the basic concepts most people are too embarrassed to admit they don’t understand.” She also mentioned that reaching to the audience; not only millennials but women too, is the difficult task. Grow is spreading knowledge about money by launching video content and targeting all type of audience.
With the fact that video content has much effect than a newsletter or mobile app to make financial market tempting, Jon Steinberg founded Cheddar. Since millennials lived through global crisis and they are open to know about planning, Cheddar encourages them as per their interests.
All these companies have emerged with the same intention to make finance sector simple and easy for millennials. Their prime focus is not selling finance, but, selling the idea of finance. They are encouraging millennials to know more about financial investment, spend and save money in the right way. So when the next financial crisis will arrive, there might be more people prepared to face and fight against it.