The children’s prepaid debit card company and financial app will now have an API-powered junior stocks and shares ISA for children aged six to 15 years old.
Parents will be able to set up an ISA for their children in ‘less than one minute’ and can contribute a minimum of USD 1.23 through automatic monthly payments, make one-off payments, and enable friends and family to contribute to it.
Seccl’s technology also allows parents using GoHenry the ability to transfer funds from other existing junior ISAs and child trust funds so that all their child’s finances can be managed in one place.
GoHenry now has 2 million customers – all between 6 and 18 years of age – across the UK, the US, and more recently France and Spain after acquiring French rival Pixpay in July 2022. Today, they use two main services from the company, a prepaid debit card and a ‘financial education’ app that links to that card.
In October 2022, GoHenry secured a USD 55 million funding round which it said was to accelerate its global expansion. The company now has more than two million customers globally, and with the junior ISA partnership will hope to expand further into the market of junior investment products.
The company is not disclosing its valuation, but according to TechCrunch it is more than USD 250 million and less than USD 500 million. It brings the total raised by GoHenry to USD 125 million, including a USD 40 million round led by Edison in 2020 and a USD 15 million angel round. Early on, GoHenry also raised USD 15 million in crowdfunding in 2016 and 2018 and it likes to say that it has 5,000 shareholders as a result of those campaigns, with half of them also users.
The pandemic played an interesting role among young people, with GoHenry seeing a surge of new users during the pandemic and an increased rate of activity among existing customers. Its research found that kids in the UK, GoHenry’s main market, earned GBP 148 million in 2021, up 9% over 2020.
Opening a children’s savings account can be a practical way to introduce a child to the world of banking and personal finance. While banks generally don’t pay high yields on kids’ savings accounts, these accounts can still be meaningful tools to start a kid on a responsible financial path from an early age.
There are typically two types of accounts people can open for their child: a savings account or a custodial account, and the difference is important. If the person opens a savings account, the parent and the child will have joint ownership of the account, and the child will be able to access the funds (with the parent being able to monitor account activity).
If a person opens a custodial account, also referred to as a Uniform Gifts to Minors Act (UGMA) or Uniform Transfers to Minors Act (UTMA) account, money in the account is treated as a gifted asset the child fully owns; funds cannot be accessed until the child turns 18. Yet using this type of account may complicate taxes.
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