GoHenry: Empowering children with money education

Many consumers are experiencing financial anxiety, affected by rising inflation and cost-of-living pressures. For families with children, it can be difficult to find the right words – and the right way – to provide financial education. GoHenry was founded in 2012 to address this need and provide parents with a convenient way to engage their children with money matters at home.

At the Innovate Finance Global Summit (IFGS), GoHenry’s co-founder and COO Louise Hill says the need for their app is stronger in today’s economy than ever before. GoHenry commissioned research at the end of last year which showed that 71% of children were worried about the cost of living crisis because they had heard it mentioned at home.

Parents today cannot afford to sweep difficult conversations about money under the rug. If children can’t talk about these topics at home, they will get the information elsewhere – whether it’s social media, TV or the playground.

“I think it’s really important that parents talk to their kids in an age-appropriate way to help them understand what the cost-of-living crisis means,” says Hill. “More than ever, it’s important to have access to simple and easy-to-use tools to help children and adults better manage their money.”

“Happy” that financial education is mainstream

As a parent, you want to be the one to deliver that life lesson to your children. But not all parents feel confident in delivering financial education to their children. When GoHenry introduced Money Missions—a series of game-based in-app money lessons for kids built into the GoHenry app—the company was inundated with requests from adults for something similar.

“Parents would say ‘my kids are asking about compound interest, or investing, or talking to me about APRs,'” Hill recalls. “They said to us, ‘I don’t know. Do you have anything to help me with?'” That’s when the app launched Money Missions for Parents, designed to give parents the confidence to talk about complex financial issues with their kids.

GoHenry must be doing something right; such is the success of fintech, the topic of financial literacy among children has re-entered the national dialogue and spawned several similar initiatives – notable among them the Barclays LifeSkills and banking app for children. “I’m happy,” Hill tells me when asked about mainstream vendors following GoHenry’s lead. “There is room in the market for other players and for different offers.

“We are fortunate in the UK that over the last 10 years we have built a huge market leadership. But that does not mean we are complacent. We must continue to listen to our customers and continue to develop the service we provide. The more out there, and the more money is talked about at home, the better it will be for society.”

A busy year underscores GoHenry’s expansion plans

It’s been 10 months since GoHenry announced the acquisition of Pixpay, another European fintech app that helps parents engage their children with money. At the time of the acquisition, Pixpay was available in France and had recently launched in Spain. In January of this year, it expanded to Italy, helping GoHenry bring its mission to more consumers.

The next development in the company’s growth story is the acquisition of GoHenry by Acorns, which was announced at the beginning of April. The US savings and investment app has agreed to acquire GoHenry, which will turbocharge the app’s plans for expansion – and it’s an exciting time to be a part of the company, Hill reveals. “We were introduced by one of their investors and it became clear very quickly how similar our missions were.” It took two years of negotiations before the agreement was finalized, partly because both companies took on new financing. Acorns raised $300 million in March 2022 and GoHenry raised $55 million in a Series B round last November. But that now means both companies are “heavily capitalized and poised for growth,” Hill says. The acquisition will see GoHenry rebranded in the US as ‘GoHenry by Acorns’ and made available to all their adult customers with children; while GoHenry will have the opportunity to roll out some of Acorns’ products and services in the UK and Europe.

It feels like a culmination of the growth journey that the brand has been on, says Hill. She speaks to us from the large gallery space of London’s Guildhall, where IFGS – one of her favorite events in the fintech calendar – takes place. But GoHenry still has some pretty big plans of his own.

“Our basic mission statement has been pretty much the same since we launched, but we’ve tweaked it a bit. One of the tweaks was “making every child smart with money” and we haven’t reached every child yet. There are more children, there are more countries. There’s more to do.”