Cards on the table

When Jimmy Donaldson, the YouTube star known as MrBeast, bought a teen banking app on 9 February 2026, he explained himself in terms of a gap in his own education. “Nobody taught me about investing, building credit, or managing money when I was growing up,” he said, and he wanted “to give millions of young people the financial foundation I never had.”^{3TechCrunchMrBeast's company buys Gen Z-focused fintech app Step9 Feb 2026} The app, Step, had more than 7m users at the time.^{3TechCrunchMrBeast's company buys Gen Z-focused fintech app Step9 Feb 2026} The price was not disclosed.

We admire the diagnosis and doubt the cure. Apps such as Step and Greenlight, whose debit cards and parent dashboards reach millions of American families, are sold as schools for money. They are better understood as the cheapest customer-acquisition channel in consumer finance.

Growing the customer base. Users reported at each date, millions (company figures; definitions differ)

	Users (millions)
Greenlight, Sep 2020	2
Greenlight, Apr 2021	3
Step, Dec 2020	0.5
Step, Feb 2026	7

Source: TechCrunch, reporting company figures¹²³

Consider what the firms say they do. Greenlight offers a debit card, a parental app for allowances and chores, and since January 2021 a tier that lets children research and buy stocks such as Apple and Tesla with a parent’s approval.^{1TechCrunchKids-focused fintech Greenlight raises $260M in a16z-led Series D, nearly doubles valuation to $2.3B27 Apr 2021} Step offers a fee-free account for 13 to 18-year-olds, a secured Visa card to build a credit history, and peer-to-peer payments.^{2TechCrunchTeen banking service Step raises $50M, adds TikTok star Charli D'Amelio to investor list2 Dec 2020} All of this is more useful than a piggy bank. Watching a real balance fall when a real card is tapped is a lesson of sorts.

The trouble is the evidence for lessons of that sort. In 2014 Daniel Fernandes, John Lynch and Richard Netemeyer pooled 168 papers covering 201 studies of financial education. They found that interventions “explain only 0.1% of the variance in financial behaviors studied”, and that, like other education, the effect “decays over time”: even large programmes “have negligible effects on behavior 20 months or more” after the intervention.^{4Management Science (Fernandes, Lynch and Netemeyer)Financial Literacy, Financial Education, and Downstream Financial Behaviors1 Aug 2014} The study concerns courses, not apps. But an app that teaches budgeting to a 14-year-old is betting that its lessons will survive until the child has a salary, and the best meta-analysis we know of says such bets usually lose.

The same paper contains the apps’ best defence, which we should state fairly. Its authors suggest “a real but narrower role” for “just in time” education tied to the specific behaviours it is meant to help.^{4Management Science (Fernandes, Lynch and Netemeyer)Financial Literacy, Financial Education, and Downstream Financial Behaviors1 Aug 2014} A teenager who sets up a chore payment, watches a transfer land and sees a card decline is getting instruction at the moment of use. That is closer to what the authors envisage than any assembly on compound interest. If apps teach anything, it will be this: narrow, practical and immediate.

Whether they do is not something we can say, and nor, in the material we read, can the firms. Their announcements report money raised and accounts opened. Greenlight’s 2021 round, a $260m Series D at a $2.3bn valuation, came with the news that more than 3m parents and children had accounts and had saved over $120m between them.^{1TechCrunchKids-focused fintech Greenlight raises $260M in a16z-led Series D, nearly doubles valuation to $2.3B27 Apr 2021} The chart shows how the headline numbers have grown. It does not show whether a single child budgets better at 25 for having had the card at 15.

What the numbers do show is a funnel. Step’s founder, CJ MacDonald, described the product in 2020 as “Venmo meets Chase for the next generation”, and the company said it planned new products for users turning 18, such as credit cards and loans.^{2TechCrunchTeen banking service Step raises $50M, adds TikTok star Charli D'Amelio to investor list2 Dec 2020} Greenlight’s backers nearly doubled its valuation, from $1.2bn, within months.^{1TechCrunchKids-focused fintech Greenlight raises $260M in a16z-led Series D, nearly doubles valuation to $2.3B27 Apr 2021} Investors do not pay such prices for a curriculum. They pay for the lifetime value of someone who opened an account before they could vote and never found a reason to leave.

None of this makes the apps sinister. A product can be good for the customer and good for the company at once. The objection is to the marketing claim. If teen fintech wants to be judged as education, it should be judged as education: publish what happens to its users’ savings, overdrafts and credit scores at 21, and let outside researchers run the numbers.

Until then, the lesson is chiefly the firms’ own. A teenager is the only customer who can be acquired once and billed for sixty years.