The surveillance, gamification and datafication of children’s finance: a feature and tagline analysis of child finance apps

Purpose Children’s finances are increasingly digitised through the emergence and development of a range of finance applications, or apps, for managing chores, saving and spending. This paper aims to offer a preliminary scoping study of these child finance apps in the nascent consumer research area of children’s FinTech. Design/methodology/approach This paper undertakes a qualitative analysis of the design features and marketing taglines of child finance apps to explore their role in the digitisation of children’s financial literacy, consumer socialisation and economic agency. Findings The present analysis reveals five key design functions of child finance apps: chore management; child savings; payment and spending systems; parental control features; and banking and finance features. Furthermore, three key child consumer themes emerge from the analysis of these child finance apps: gamification of child household labour; surveillance of children’s consumer participation; and datafication of children’s financial lives. Originality/value To date, there is little research into the increasingly popular use of child chore, consumption and financial management apps, and thus a research gap or problem is that we do not yet have sufficient understanding of how finance apps operate through their design and marketing to influence the financial conditions of contemporary childhoods. This study is significant in bringing theories of surveillance, gamification and datafication from digital platform studies to the fields of childhood studies, children’s consumer research and child FinTech studies. The findings suggest that child finance apps use gamification features to encourage children’s financial learning, surveillance features to enable parenting care in children’s financial development and datafication to exploit children’s financial data within the finance industry. This study is clearly limited to the app environment, and so future work should investigate the use and perceptions of these apps in more detail using more situated social research methods with families and children.