Roobini Givananadam, Policy Analyst, Alliance for Financial Inclusion
My financial education began with pocket money, piggy banks, and the small thrill of depositing a few notes into a savings account. Money was something to touch, count, and hold.
Recently, my six‑year‑old niece picked up my father’s phone, pointed it at a restaurant’s QR code and said, with complete confidence, “I want to pay.”
The first truly cashless generation is among us. Their earliest experiences with money are not material, but virtual. Long before they understand value, risk, or consent, they are navigating digital ecosystems that many adults struggle to keep up with.
A recent AFI Digital Financial Services Working Group (DFSWG) meeting explored children’s interactions with digital finance. Research was shared which highlighted how routine financial risk has become in children’s online lives. In the UK, almost half of children aged 8 to 17 report being targeted by online scams. Children as young as eight reported losing money. These are not edge cases. For many young people, digital scams are now part of everyday life.
Thanks to gaming platforms, in‑app purchases, virtual currencies, and social media, spending is viewed as instant and frictionless, often disguised as play. Consequences are often abstract – while parents may have the ability to approve and monitor spending, children’s financial behavior has the potential to go unchecked and un-noticed until problems appear.
Regulation must now catch up to the digital world based on convenience and speed which children inhabit. In the UK, where regulators are moving to formally regulate ‘buy now, pay later’ products, the guardrails are being built only after widespread use. Within the AFI network, central banks and financial regulators are actively regulating financial access for young users. Many oversee guardian-linked and youth savings accounts, increasingly accessed through mobile and online channels. In the Philippines, proportional regulatory approaches for youth have been integrated into broader strategies.
In Bosnia and Herzegovina, the Central Bank emphasizes children’s financial literary by leading national research and working with education authorities to integrate financial education into schools. These efforts recognize children as participants in financial systems, even as child-specific considerations in digital financial services continue to evolve.
One element which emerged from the DFSWG discussion is the shift from traditional, stand-alone products to fully digital financial ecosystems, where children may interact with payments, virtual currencies, and in-app spending in ways that fall between traditional regulatory categories.
This raises familiar DFS and consumer protection questions around transparency, fairness, consent, data use, and redress, but for a user group that is rarely visible in fintech data or regulatory reporting.
During the DFSWG discussion, UNICEF shared proposed Guiding Principles for Child‑Inclusive FinTech which seek to ground digital financial product design in children’s rights. At their core, they are not about granting children financial independence. They are about acknowledging that children already interact with digital money, and that we should design those interactions responsibly.
That means:
- Building age‑appropriate products and interfaces
- Handling children’s data with care and restraint
- Eliminating exploitative or manipulative design
- Involving children meaningfully in product design
- Ensuring families have clear recourse when harm occurs
The DFSWG conversation felt like the opening of a policy door. Country contexts and capacities differ, and there is no single model to adopt. But the discussion itself suggests an opportunity: to reflect on where existing DFS frameworks already support child‑inclusive safeguards, and where blind spots remain.
Fintech is increasingly shaping how children learn about money, long before they fully understand value or risk. That compels us to think about what safe, fair participation means in practice, and about design, protection, and trust in a cashless world.
Increasingly active and uniquely vulnerable, these young consumers deserve our full attention.