Gen Z

Welcome to Building Better Developers, the Developer Nord podcast, where we work on getting better step by step professionally and personally. Let's get started. Well, hello and welcome back. We are into a new interview. This episode, we're going to be speaking with Mark Bolton. We're going to talk about Gen Z. Particularly, we're going to spend a lot of time talking about like the, they're focused on financial, the world of financials and how they see stuff differently. If you're in Gen Z, this will be interesting to see if you would agree with him or not. This is somebody who is not. He's more of a Gen Xer, much like myself. But there is definitely a difference in the generations, particularly in how they view work and wealth and accumulation and effort and all that kind of stuff. And that's where we get into in this episode and the next one when we wrap up our interview, our discussion with Mark. He's spent a lot of time on it. He's got a book that he's written, writing another book on it. So I think this is just one of those that it's good to step back a little bit. And instead of getting too deep into the technology, although this is something to think about because this is the next generation coming up. So these are the people that we want to appeal to with our products and services. I'm not going to steal too much of his thunder. Let's go right into our conversation with Mark. All right. Today, we're going to start a new conversation. We're going to speak with Mark Bolton and we're going to talk Gen Z. We're going to go probably all over the place talking about Gen Z, but this is something that he is knowledgeable about, passionate about, wrote a book about it, the Gen Z Money Manual. And I think there's a lot of information here that you're going to get, whether you are Gen Z or whether you're marketing or working with or selling to Gen Z, because there's a lot of them out there and they do impact the economy and what we do and even some of the messaging and such that we should use. So without further ado, I want to thank you for coming on to the show, Mark. And if you can go ahead and give a little better introduction because mine was pretty brief. Sure. Thank you, Rob. Nice to be here. So I've been kicking around the financial services space about 30 years. I started my career with one of the old Wall Street banks that ended up being absorbed by Citibank. And I've worked for most of the big names on the street over my time in the last decade or so. I've also spent an increasing amount of time as the effectively as the poacher rather than the gamekeeper. So working in the consulting firms, I did five years for Accenture. I've worked for PWC and I've also more recently worked for Capgemini Invent. And particularly in the last few years of those, I started doing increasing amounts of work around digital product design that really focused on Gen Z. So I helped build a neo bank for a new banking company in Connecticut. I was the program director on that. And then I worked extensively with one of our design. The last company I was with, we had an in-house design company, digital design company, very famous one called Frog that worked with Steve Jobs to design the Apple II, helped co-design the Sony Walkman, big name kind of outfit. We did a lot of work around digital product design for one of the big banks, company, and specifically aimed at products for Gen Z. So that kind of sparked my interest. That combined with my general interest in personal finance and helping myself, I thought, you know what, I want to pass on what I have learned of what works and what doesn't work. And that's why I wrote this book, The Gen Z Money Manual. So, yeah, so that's that's a brief introduction. I'm obviously a Brit originally. I live here in Florida and I've been here about a decade. I've been in the U.S. City 20 years, really loving it and looking forward to talking with you. Well, excellent. Let's start right into the particularly because you spent time, you know, this exactly the kind of conversations we love to have. And so you've spent time focusing on products for Gen Z and digital products. So what are what are some things that make Gen Z different that, you know, as part of that focus where it's instead of a general focus, but it's really going to speak to them? The one thing that stands out and you can read this widely is that Gen Z from the get go has been digital native. So, you know, I have a granddaughter who's right at the young end of Gen Z. She's just coming up to 11 years old. So she's at the very youngest and below that is Gen Alpha. OK, also digital native, but she's a true digital native. I mean, when she was three years old, she was playing on her father's phone and on her mom's phone. And she's never not known the technology to be at her fingertips. Understanding the operating environments and wheezy wig and all the stuff that when I was going through college, we were starting to learn about Wimps, Windows, Icon, Mouse, Pointer, Wheezy Wig. All that stuff was new 30 years ago. And now it's embedded in all the devices we work with. And she's an example of, you know, young Gen Z that has evolved, has grown up with those devices. So so when designing digital products, you've got to you've got to make them interesting. They've got to be visually interesting, fun to use, interesting to use, functionally rich. There's a kind of a different there's kind of a different palette and a different language from maybe aimed more at, you know, guys like you and I, Rob. And I'm guessing I'm Gen X. I don't know if you're Gen X or you're maybe Boomer. I don't know. But I hope I'm not offending you. We're I suspect we're both pretty pretty digitally savvy. We've been in and around tech a long time. We get it like the new toys as well. But a lot of people our generation have not. And and so selling to others is a different proposition from selling to Gen Z digital natives and building products for the Gen Z is different. So I guess let's start with the yeah, that makes a lot of sense because that is definitely I think the probably the primary defining difference is that they grew up with all of this and we grew up and I'm Gen X as well. So we grew up Gen X or Y. We're like we're transitioning into it. So we saw it. But depending on whether you're old Gen X or young Gen Y kind of stuff is your how much depends on how much of your childhood involved, whether it was like, you know, the old Atari 2600 kind of digital thing or whether you actually had a cell phone or something close to maybe a pre-smartphone that you dealt with early on. Now, one of the things you mentioned is that they for Gen Z, they want something that's got to be fun and interesting and visually appealing. And that in particular is something's interesting. Is does that mean is that like across the board or is it for things? It's a product that you want an entertainment product. They want to have that. But if it's a business product, then they do they have a different different view of it. Or even if it's a business product, for example, let's say like because you're in finance, like a personal finance, like a checkbook account or something like that. Do they need they do they still need to have that or is Gen Z sort of split it where it's like there are some things that just need to be functional and they're they're good with that. Or is it really all need to be like a better term entertaining to them? Well, OK, and I don't want to trivialize it because that's that's not that's not fair and that's that's not appropriate. I think good design is good design. So, for example, if you look at just give you one little tiny niche that I know I know reasonably well. A few years ago, Intuit bought a product called Mint, M-I-N-T. And Mint is a free product with an app. So it's either as a browser or app. And in it, you can kind of feed in all of your credit cards and banks, bank information, and it will give you a consolidated financial view of where you're at from. And it's from the perspective of income and expenses, but also assets and liabilities. So it does a lot all in one package that is beginning to be superseded by a new product called Rocket Money. Why? Rocket Money does much the same thing. It consolidates, but it's just a little bit of a more modern design. It's a little bit more pleasurable to use. It does offer some specific additional functionality, which Mint does not, but Mint could build it, which is around subscription management. Right. So that's like recurring expenses. It offers a little bit more functionality in some areas and less in others, but it's just a bit nicer to work with both on the browser and on the app. So good design is good design. And I don't think it much matters. You know, I think the generational thing is a bit of a red herring there. But what I would say is I think Gen Z is less tolerant and quite rightly so of poor design, of poor ergonomics, of poor customer experience, of poor journey through the application, of poor inability to navigate an application that's overly complex or convoluted in its design. They are less tolerant of that and they'll make a much quicker decision about whether they're going to continue with use. So you and I might persevere with something for a significant period of time. We might give it a week, a couple of weeks. I'm going to get this thing. I'll make it. I'll figure out how to work it. Gen Z will like, you know what, screw this, move on. And they'll find the next app that's out there that covers the core functionality they need, but meets those other design criteria around usability, journey, accessibility and so on in a much, much better way. So I think, I think they're not sensitive. They have a sensibility. They have an awareness of good digital product design that's significantly more advanced than the older generations. And that's something that's a challenge for people building these products. They cannot be sloppy. They cannot be loose. They cannot refer back necessarily to the way things used to work or used to be done. It's a particular challenge for big financial services players because behind this, the thin layer at the front, right? The very, very thin layer that faces the customer is usually a, excuse my French shit show of ancient spaghetti, plugs ultimately into mainframes with all kinds of other stuff between that thin veneer that touches the customer and what's in the back end. And it's difficult to disentangle that, to build digital products that are truly, truly revolutionary and truly a joy to use at the front with simple and effective because of all of this horrible architecture that sits behind it. And it's a big challenge. All the big financial services players are working with that right now or struggling with that right now, I should say. That's actually fascinating. That was one of the questions I was going to ask is how tolerant or not Gen Z is versus maybe some of the other generation. And it's interesting because I would always, you think of older people that are not as technical, technology savvy as complaining about, well, this just doesn't work and they don't want to change and the interface is too complicated. But it sounds like, so I would have guessed that Gen Z would be more tolerant, but it sounds like it really is something that they've seen it progress. So they're going to expect it to get better. They're not going to sit back with the way it used to be, as you said. And so within that, and another thing in your example is actually, perfect example that is from where they moved from mint to rocket money. While it may be that Gen Z doesn't spend as much time maybe investing in starting on something before they make a quick decision, are they also just as quick to move to a new platform or are they less loyal to something that's worked for them maybe than other generations have been? I don't know if there's any research around that. I'm actually sitting with about 20 hours of research reading to go through, but there may be something in that. I'm very focused. I've got another book coming out on investing behaviors. So I'm researching for that. There may be something in there about that. So don't absolutely know the answer. I have a suspicion in the research I've done so far and the work I've done with Gen Z is that there is, I wouldn't say a lower tolerance, but being so digitally savvy and aware of what works and what doesn't for them means that they are quicker to come to decisions which are just as good as a decision that you or I might make, but we would make it more slowly because we've had less exposure to the data points that allow us to come to that decision. So we have to synthesize an opinion about an application. It takes us longer to do that. Gen Z will tend to arrive at a conclusion more quickly. Also, well aware that there are many, many more alternatives in the marketplace today. And that goes from, and that's why, again, it's my specialty and background, but in financial services, that's why the banks have been so nervous about companies like Betterment, Wealthfront, and all of these other startup wealth managers because the banks may have the heft and the security and the brand and all of that from years ago, but honestly, the technology interface of the customer is mostly horrible and is beginning to improve partly because they're acquiring some of these companies as they grow up. So I think Wealthfront and Betterment still remain independent, but there are other ones that have been acquired as these fintechs grow because the banks are essentially buying them for that last, for that last, what I call last mile of customer interface of how does this feel to the customer knowing that while boomers don't necessarily distinguish well around the technology, Gen X much more so, Millennials more still, and Gen Z will have no tolerance for poor design. So they know that they have to move in this direction. So does that actually then sort of beg the question for some of these big organizations, would it be better at this point to essentially like a better term, start from scratch and say instead of building on what we have is actually a step back. And this is also even with the smaller companies, is this something where it's better for them to say, you know what, we're not even going to bother with the way it used to be. We're going to look at what this problem is and see if we can create a new solution, something that's different. And maybe we have a little less risk because we've got people that are more open to a brand new approach to something. Theoretically a great idea and people have been theorizing it for a long time, but the problem is there's 50 years of plumbing that can't be undone. And behind that, there's a hundred years of business processes that that technology architecture and that technology plumbing reflects. So let me explain what I mean. If you want to be in the business of offering investment services to Gen Z through a gorgeous, easy to work with app, okay, you're going to ultimately have to plug back all the way back in to the New York Stock Exchange, right? The Chicago Board of Trade Futures Exchanges, the London Stock Exchange and so on, right? Ultimately. And there's a massive technological and business architecture that facilitates that you and you on your phone, on an app on the phone can buy stock in. So I just bought some stock in WeWork, right? Very interesting. I thought, you know, I'll buy some stock in WeWork. We'll see how that plays out if they're in business in another month. But being able to do that on my phone, there's a huge amount of architecture behind that's been built out over 50 years. So it's really not that simple. Now, what the fintechs have done is they've tried to disintermediate all of that and say, we're going to concentrate on the customer experience on the application layer and really focus on building something beautiful. And then we're going to use the latest tools and techniques to present back into the architecture behind us. And we'll figure out how that's going to hook in. And that's how they've ended up doing it, whether it's microservices, API, whatever those technological hooks are. But they still ultimately have to deal with the old world. There's simply no way around it. You cannot trade stock on your app, on your phone, unless ultimately there's a mile of spaghetti that connects you right back to the New York Stock Exchange. That's the challenge. Now, again, this is a perfect example, because I find it the financial services area is one of those that they've said they've been around for forever. In a sense, their technology is seriously at this point pushing almost 100 years old when they first started doing some initial technology kind of stuff. So are you saying that I know plenty of banks running 40 year old mainframes? Which is a good thing, because that's cutting edge for them, in a sense. So are you seeing that these legacy systems and processes, are you seeing any movement from them towards some of the new approaches? Or is this one of those things where you just sort of have to assume that's going to be a monolith that's going to be there, and your better approach is to just assume it's going to stay there forever and try to find a way to work with it, as opposed to wait for it to maybe make some advances? Yeah, so right at the back end, the big thing that's been going on for the last few years is cloud migration. So the big three hyperscalers is your AWS and GCP, Google are all over this. They are increasingly penetrating the banking market, but believe it or not, most banks are still less than 20% on the cloud and 80% still in on-prem data centers. And that's because, as I said, I know banks that are running IBM 3800 systems, these big room boxes from the 1980s and 70s, because they've got their core banking systems on there with all of their customer accounts and all of their core banking data is sitting in those boxes. Now there's a whole series of technologies that are shipping now that, for example, emulate mainframe and allow you as a stepping stone to get off of the mainframe box onto a mainframe emulation, but sitting in cloud. So Google, AWS, Azure, they all have these products. That's a huge business and it's a growing business. And it will be a stepping stone towards ultimately removing everything off of these old legacy technology platforms at the back end. But somebody somewhere still has to unpick thousands and thousands and thousands, sorry, millions of lines of COBOL code to figure out how do we rebuild this functionality in a modern platform. You've got to find this army of COBOL programmers who can unpick millions of lines of code from these boxes from the 70s, 80s, 90s and rebuild that in new platforms and rebuild that functionality. And that's a big challenge. So one of the things in thinking through this, and it's a little bit of a change of focus here, is you've been focused on digital products and we've talked about Gen Z and what their tolerances are basically and where they're open to stuff and where they're not. Now one of the things is the product types themselves, because one of the things that I think, and you can talk about this if you want to add a little more, but it seems like Gen Z is not they're not as into owning stuff. The whole simplistic aesthetic kind of life is something that definitely has a hold in the Gen Z community and that's a very popular one. But particularly from a digital product point of view, do you see that that's still something where they, are they going to limit the apps that they have on their phone? Are they going to be less likely to spend money on everything or is it really that like, we'll call it the material possessions, the physical things that you see less of that? The jury is still out on the complete answer to that question, but here's my take on where Gen Z are landing on some of these issues around ownership of both virtual and physical assets. I think the big kind of rejection of ownership was really a millennial thing more than a Gen Z thing. And Gen Z are very unusual because they've had this two key experiences. It's not totally defined them, but the two key experiences being the great recession, which they mainly saw parents coming through, family members, not themselves, but parents and family members. And the second one is obviously the pandemic. And one of the things, a couple of trends are shaping up from that. One is that they tend to be quite entrepreneurial. Okay. They want to, they have a lot of them have side hustles or they're thinking about starting some business on the side of, or you started a business or it's a goal to start a business to give them a level of independence, financial independence from the world, I said from the world, but from big employers, because they saw people being let go in the great recession. And then they saw it again in the pandemic and they're like, hold on a minute, inside of a decade, it happened twice. Okay. You know, notes to self beware of big employers. I mean, that's a lesson you would take away from that observation inside of 10 years, two recessions. So real drive towards independence. And if anything, I think they're going to be very smart about ownership. So I'm seeing them enable more subtly distinguishing between the things that they really should be owning, right? Which is there may be things like real estate and stocks and intellectual property and businesses and the things that they don't really need to own like vehicles and some digital, some, some low value digital data. And, and they're making, they're beginning to make that distinction. And I think, as I say, it's an emerging picture, because don't forget the oldest of Gen Z is only like 23, 24, 25 right now. So we're beginning to see it, but I think they're making a distinction between things that should be owned and things that shouldn't be owned in a way that was different from the old generation. And the millennial rejection of all of kind of not rejection, but more rejection of just ownership in general as a concept. It was subscribed to everything. Everything is a service. What I do think Gen Z have been very smart about though, is ownership of their own data. I think they're going to be very smart about that. They're going to want to, they're going to want to see protections in place. They love social media as we know, we all do, but they, they're very comfortable in social, in social media world up to a point, but they actually share in many cases less and more carefully than their more grown up millennial siblings. And so they're aware of the value of their digital footprint. And I think they're going to be looking for increased protections. There was a, it's a little bit on the side, but I was doing some work earlier this year on AI regulation. And I sat through the three hours of the Senate, Senate Judicial Committee on AI with, who was there? The guy who runs ChatGPT, gone out of my head. A whole bunch of significant witnesses were there. What was said repeatedly in that judicial committee meeting by senators from both sides of the aisle was that they missed the boat on regulating social media when they had the opportunity, maybe five to 10 years ago, and it got out of control. And the genie was out of the lamp effectively. Genie was out of the bottle, couldn't put it back. And they said, they repeatedly said, we're not going to allow that to happen with AI. But so where I'm going with this is I think that Gen Z will be part of that push to take back control of their own data. And they'll look at, they'll look internationally at what's happening in other jurisdictions as well. And the EU has very strict rules around this. California also has put very strict rules in place, right? So that you can control your own data. And I think Gen Z is going to push more for that. So they're going to be smart about and very thoughtful about the things they want to own versus the things that just don't matter. And that's the distinction you'll see. And we will pause right there, but don't fear. We will come back next time around, not next episode, but one after that, we're going to come back. We're going to wrap up our conversation and continue digging into the world of Gen Z. And yes, this is the world of not only today, but also tomorrow, the next probably 10, 15, 20 years, we're going to see a lot of them and how they impact the world of product services and the world itself. So this is a good one to think about and maybe ruinate on a little bit as we're sitting here around the end of, you know, beginning of a year, depending on when you're listening to this. So we'll come back next time around, but until then go out there and have yourself a great day, a great week, and we will talk to you next time. 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