Selected Papers of #AoIR2024: The 25th Annual Conference of the Association of Internet Researchers Sheffield, UK / 30 Oct - 2 Nov 2024 Nansen, L. and Bliss, L. (2024, October). Finance Apps and the Datafication of Children’s Economic Lives. Paper presented at AoIR2024: The 25th Annual Conference of the Association of Internet Researchers. Sheffield, UK: AoIR. Retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. FINANCE APPS AND THE DATAFICATION OF CHILDREN’S ECONOMIC LIVES Bjørn Nansen The University of Melbourne Lauren Bliss The University of Melbourne Introduction Children’s finances are increasingly datafied through the emergence and development of applications for managing chores, saving, and spending. These finance apps incorporate features for both parents and children, enabling the setting and tracking of chores, the payment of allowances or pocket money, as well as supporting and managing children’s saving and spending habits. The paper undertakes an analysis of features across child finance apps, exploring their role in the datafication of children’s finances and economic participation. We identify and argue that the data produced by child finance apps simultaneously enables increased agency and control of children’s financial lives by initiating a lifelong digital trace. Background: Children’s Finance and Digital Platform Research Child finance apps are digital platforms that enable the mediation and monitoring of children’s chores, allowances, saving and spending. In doing so, they offer possibilities for reshaping children’s household labour, financial literacy, consumer socialisation, and economic agency. Apps for managing children’s finances can be located within broader research on the intersection of technology and finance, or FinTech, characterised by the transformation of economic transactions into information, detailed consumer data records, and the development platform economies (Dieter and Tkacz, 2020; Langley and Leyshon, 2021; O’Dwyer, 2023). Child finance apps operate at the intersection of children’s financial socialisation and digital platform studies. Child finance literature has focused on questions associated with children’s financial literacy, socialisation, and wellbeing. This literature has noted the importance of child chore payments or allowances as compensation for household labour (Sato, 2011; Zelizer, 2002), and for enabling children as economic agents (ChildWise, 2022; Marshall, 2010; Levison, 2000), operating as part of a broader commercialisation of childhood (Schor, 2014). Yet, this research has not addressed the implications of child finance apps and datafication on children’s economic lives. Digital data and platform studies research has considered the datafication of childhood through digital tracking of children’s biometric, social, or behavioural data, in which their everyday lives are tracked and operationalised through aggregation and analytics to create forms of cultural, political, and economic value for families, governments, and industry (Lupton and Williamson, 2017; Mascheroni, 2020; Mascheroni and Holloway, 2019; Mascheroni and Siibak, 2021). Within family contexts, child datafication is often described as a kind of intimate or careful surveillance (Leaver, 2017; Richardson et al. 2017), in which child data tracking apps are adopted as a mode of providing well- intentioned care and good parenting (Mavoa et al. 2023; Page Jeffrey, 2021; Sandvik, 2020; Suuk and Siibak, 2021). Conversely, such datafication highlights how digital surveillance is increasingly normalised as a part of childhood (Albrechtslund and Lauritsen, 2013; Marciano, 2022). This paper offers a novel contribution to these fields, applying the concept of datafication to children’s financial lives through a feature analysis of children’s finance apps. Researching Finance App Features We investigate the operational features of finance apps using a feature analysis approach (Hasinoff and Bivens, 2021), which is based in and draws from interface, app, and digital platform studies research (Burgess, 2021; Dieter et al., 2019; Dieter and Tkacz, 2020; Poell et al., 2019). Feature analysis builds on the close attention other scholars pay to app interfaces and the ways culture is embedded in app design by specifically concentrating on app features and applying an analysis of the mechanisms and conditions of shared or common features that operate across a category of app types (Hassinof and Bivens, 2021), as well as the ways they construct meaning and norms by reflecting “cultural norms, assumptions, and ideologies” (Hasinoff and Bivens, 2021: 90). Our feature analysis of children’s finance apps offers a preliminary summary of how digital platforms mediate the financial status, capacities, and relationships of children. Using iterative keyword searches in the Apple Appstore, we identified 12 apps for inclusion, selecting English language apps that were marketed as apps for managing various aspects of children’s chores, saving, and/or spending.1 Findings and Discussion 1 Note, the set of apps analysed is not exhaustive, with new apps continuing to emerge, whilst others not included here are tied to various geographic regions or languages, or more directly to banking institutions. Our app feature analysis initially documented the political economy and commercial operating model of these 12 child finance apps by detailing their cost, country of development and availability, financial affiliation, connected payment systems, and target user groups (see Table 1). App Name Cost Country Financial Affiliation Payment System Target Users Spriggy $60 p/y (AUD) Australia Indue Ltd (non-bank) Prepaid, Visa or Mastercard Family, Kids 6-17 Kit No fees Australia Commonwealth Bank of Australia Prepaid Visa card Family, Kids 4-17 Greenlight Tiered, $4.99 - $14.98 p/m (US) USA Greenlight financial (non-bank) Prepaid Mastercard Family, Kids 8-18 Gimi Freemium, Pro €2.99 p/m Sweden Gimi (non-bank) Prepaid Mastercard Family, Kids age 6+ FamZoo Subscription $5.99 p/m (US) USA FamZoo (non-bank) Prepaid Mastercard Family, all ages Go Henry £3.99 p/m (UK) UK Go Henry (non-bank) Prepaid Visa Card Kids aged 6- 18 FLX $2.50 p/m, or $25 p/y (AUD) Australia Inloop, Macquarie and Westpac Bank Prepaid Mastercard Family, school age Revolut <18 $9.99 p/m (AUD) Global Revolut banking services, (non-bank) Prepaid Visa card Family, kids aged 6-17 HyperJar Free UK Modulr FS (non-bank) Prepaid Mastercard Family, Kids age 6+ iAllowance App store $4.99 download Global Jump Gap software, no banking features No card, App only Family, Kids age 4+ S’moresUp Freemium, $4.99 p/m (US) USA No No card, App only Family Chores & Allowance Bot $29.99 p/y (US) Global No No card, app only Family Table 1: Children’s finance app operating model overview We then documented the app features by reviewing information in Appstore descriptions, company websites, and product reviews to identify the range of features spread across these apps, and map their presence within each (see Table 2). The final list of features were coded according to five key design functions: chore management features (numbers 1-7); child savings features (numbers 8-9); payment and spending features (numbers 10-15); parental control features (numbers 16-18); and more niche banking and finance features (numbers 19-22). The coding analysis revealed three distinct child finance app categories that drew on different sets of design functions, offering varied affordances for mediating children’s financial literacy and consumer socialisation. These app categories were: those designed solely with features to manage chores or pocket money without connection to banking services (Green in Table 2); apps designed to mediate children’s finance through savings, payment, and spending features without any chore related functionality (Blue in Table 2); and apps that seek to combine both finance and chore features and functionality to mediate child financial management (Red in Table 2). App Type and Name Feature List Combined Chore and Finance apps Finance apps Chore apps S priggy K it G reenlight G im i Fam zoo G o H enry FLX R evolut <18 H yperJar iA llow - ance C & A B ot S ’ m ores U p 1. Set chores 2. Approve chores 3. Chore notify 4. Chore calendar 5. Chore alert 6. Chore payment 7. Rewards 8. Set savings goals 9. Monitor savings 10. Auto allowance 11. Prepaid card 12. Spend on/offline 13. Monitor spending 14. Spend notification 15. Cash withdraw 16. Set spend limits 17. Merchant block 18. Temp block card 19. Personalise card 20. Money transfer 21. Investment plans 22. Interest payments Table 2: Children’s finance app feature comparison (Green=chore apps; Blue=finance apps; Red=chore+finance apps) Themes of child finance apps: management, mediation, datafication After identifying five key design functions and three categories of child finance apps, our analysis considers three emergent themes in which these apps are significantly impacting children’s financial lives: management of child household labour; mediation of children’s financial agency; and datafication of children’s economic participation. Management of child household labour uses chore management features to ostensibly reinforce traditional financial values such as awareness of the value of money and instilling a strong work ethic created via compensation for their domestic labour and allowance payment on completion (Sato, 2011). Chores are also gamified via in-app rewards such as virtual badges, stickers and digital tokens that contain no financial value (Bjering et al., 2015). Here, children’s household ‘work’ is translated into ‘play’, creating contradictory meanings around the economic value of their labour and financial socialisaton. Mediation of children’s financial agency occurs through features designed to support savings, child budgeting, as well as purchasing through payment systems and prepaid debit cards. Payment and spending features ensure children are socialised as active consumers (De La Rosa and Tully 2021). In turn, datafication features that digitally record all spending transactions or block cash withdrawals limit children’s financial privacy, independence, and agency, whilst establishing conditions for lifelong finance tracking. Datafication of children’s economic participation occurs through a range of data collection and control features operating at various scales of operation and visibility. Parents can monitor and control children’s finances through features such as temporarily blocking their spending or blocking age-inappropriate merchant categories. The datafied financial lives of children connects with a wider intimate surveillance of childhoods within family life that operate between care and control (Albrechtslund and Lauritsen, 2013; Leaver, 2017; Richardson et al., 2017). Parental monitoring is underpinned by care for children’s financial safety and wellbeing, though simultaneously entrenches norms of parental authority and surveillance, reducing children’s financial autonomy (Mavoa et al., 2023; Page Jeffrey, 2021). Beyond families, child finance data is collected, aggregated, and analysed to create economic value for digital platforms, banking institutions, and the financial industry. Here power imbalances may be less visible but much more pronounced for children’s financial futures. This study is significant in bringing together and contributing to children’s financial socialisation and digital platform studies. The research shows how datafication operates in child finance apps to mediate children’s consumer agency by emphasising the development of financial literacy and independence. Yet they are fundamentally organised through processes and effects of datafication, generating valuable data to control the economic lives of children through parental and corporate surveillance. This study is limited to app feature data, and so future work should investigate the use and perceptions of these apps through more situated user research methods with families and children. References Albrechtslund, A., and Lauritsen, P. (2013) Spaces of Everyday Surveillance: Unfolding an Analytical Concept of Participation. Geoforum 49: 310-316. Bjering, A., Høiset,h M., and Alsos, O. (2015) Gamification and Family Housework Applications. 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