Gen Z and Financial Services

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 in part two of an interview. We're speaking with Mark Bolton. We're going to be talking about Gen Z. If you remember last time we got into it, this is sort of funny. It's a couple of Gen Xers talking about the Gen Zs or Gen Zers. But we're going to talk about what we've seen and particularly what he has witnessed and how this is going to be different moving forward. So this is going to be a key thing as we're looking at the world of products and services and how those are likely to evolve, particularly the kinds of things that now we have people very comfortable with because they have spent their entire life with technology all around them. Let's get right back in our conversation because he says it best. Now along those lines is, and particularly with, I'm thinking because this happens a lot with financial tools, is that there's sort of like an entry level app and then a lot of the companies, a lot of the services, they will make money on the app by having like add-ons like how to invest better or things, tools to help you do more than just like the vanilla stuff. So in that kind of world of there's, for the lack of an answer, there's sort of like the freebie stuff. There's the like, you can do this, but then there's that extra level of learning from mentors or experts or things like that. Is Gen Z one that's going to, do they step up to that level? Do they see that as something that counts or are they more a, hey, we're going to go do it ourselves. We've got the tool and we'll just figure it out kind of a generation, particularly in this case, particularly because you've done the, you've spent time in the financial services. Is that what you're seeing with the kinds of products that you guys are providing? Yeah, that freebie model works for everybody, but it does work, it does also work well for Gen Z. I think where the gap is in a lot of current products and services, and again, I'm going to speak to my real niche that I know best, which is financial services, is Gen Z is struggling for trusted advice and trusted guidance that goes along with the products and services. So at the moment, bluntly they're following people like me, and there's a whole bunch of other people who are writing and talking about financial issues for Gen Z. They're following me on TikTok, on Instagram, and that's fine, and I've written a book and that's all great. But there's no good place to go to for financial education that maybe wraps around or is embedded within an application, and I think that is where companies have an opportunity to make their products way more valuable because they offer, as well as investing, as well as the opportunity to take a better than type product, as well as the product itself where you can go and you can buy stocks and shares or ETFs or whatever you want, and you can do very simple stuff, complex stuff. There's also a ton of education that goes along with it that is trustworthy, that checks out that it's consistent and viable and sits along with the application as part of the overall experience of using that product. And I think that's a gap right now that a lot of financial services players don't know quite how to fill. They maybe don't know where to get the educators and people to bring in. They don't know quite how to run. Not technically. Technically, it's easy enough to run a kind of an education product within the app as well. But I think they're struggling to figure out how to make it work and how to make it sticky enough and interesting enough that Gen Z will take the app, take the product, use the investment side, for example, and the education side together and remain loyal to the product. And I think that's where the challenge is right now. I don't have the answer. It sounds like it's almost, it's incorrect when you're up, but it sounds like one of the challenges that Gen Z will almost do a best of breed kind of approach where they will, if you've got a product and you've got a really good educational piece to it, they'll take that. But if your product's subpar, they'll just take the education, do that for a while, and then they'll go find a product that is above par, that is much better than yours. Yeah, that's true. I think that is absolutely true. They will exactly. They do best of breed, mix and match. They'll take the pieces that they want from different places. That, you know, the handful of companies that do get this right, though, will provide sticky product experiences and they will build really big market positions in Gen Z. And what tends to happen? Well, I don't, we have to see how people age, but people tend to become a little more conservative and a little more, a little more loyal to brands over time. So that's why it's so important. I mean, the company that I worked for, the client that I was working for, one of the is second or third biggest bank in the world. And they were very, very aware that they had to make the product sticky from the start. Now, the particular product that we designed for the bank was a credit card with a whole embedded set of functionality around ability to plug in all of your other credit card information, banking information. So consolidation. And it showed your, the credit card they offered in the context of the, of your overall financial picture. And then there was some education embedded with it as well. And they were building other pieces once I moved on from that particular engagement with that client, but they were building other pieces as well, including social community, gamification type, type activities in there as well. All of these things in this very, very rich app that was really around just one product, which was a credit card. But they knew that if they got that product right, that they could then put other, put other financial services products into there as well. So credit cards, then it will be accounts and then it will be investing and then it would be FX or whatever it may be. So they were very committed to that. It's a really important part of their future strategy around Gen Z. So with that, as you're talking through that, it brings to mind to me is. And particularly because now you've been around financial services for for many, many years, so you've sort of, I think, seen some of the trends is one of the things that basically anybody that's building products for Gen Z, are they going to have to, I would say, shorten their development cycles? Do they need to keep things fresh and keep things moving? Or are you seeing that it's sort of like it was in the past? Some products, you know, you always have to either you have to put enhancements in or eventually you're going to fade and die away. But are you seeing that maybe that cycle is now improving, increasing or shortening a little bit because they need that, that consistent, like, you know, you have to keep up with the Joneses in a in a product that's not necessarily in a, you know, in a personal sense. I think once you get once you get your MVP and that core functionality that you're always going to provide, that's going to be such a core part of why that product exists. I think getting to that point can take time to get that right. But after that, you need to be going to daily releases. It's like, you know, Amazon, Amazon is probably one of the best at this, but they they will they will try things. They will try things. They will release something. And if it doesn't work, they'll literally remove it, remove that that piece of code, that piece of functionality a couple of weeks or a month or so later and then replace it. And they're super agile. But around but but always around the core functionality of the Amazon shopping app and that ability to place orders, have things delivered. You know, that's the core functionality that never changes. But lots of other things around it change all of the time. And they're constantly testing, A B testing, but also just testing for, you know, just does this does this piece have take up? Does it get used? Does it work? Does it one of the one of the bugs and issues with it? And that agility around your core product, I think, is incredibly important. Every development shop is going to need to work that way for for the, you know, for the ultimate customer facing product. So that point you mentioned that I said, we can go all over the place with this. You mentioned an MVP. And as you were describing the reactions to that, one of the things that in the past has been, I guess, some contention is somebody's building a product is whether you just like get it out the door or whether you make sure it's good the first time around. And, you know, we've I've seen personally, and I think a lot of products are getting more. So there is that sort of an MVP approach. So is that is that really something you're seeing with Gen Z where it's like, hey, you get it out there and if it's not, you know, if it's not great, that's OK. You can come back, you know, a month or two later with a new version and you can bring them back. Or is it something where if they if they see it and they don't like it, they're probably not going to come back to it. It's a little different with so, you know, no, no, no, the big banks, for example, excuse me. No, the big banks would want to put a product in the market that that was not successful either because it was buggy or it didn't meet the need or for any other reason. They're inherently conservative, and that is that is a challenge for the banks. The fintechs tend to tend to want to move more, tend to move more quickly. But you can remember that financial services like, for example, pharma and health care is highly regulated industry. So there's a whole raft of legislation and rules around what you kind of can't do. You can't just throw a crap of products out there. Just you're going to get you're going to get fined and closed down by a regulator. So there's certainly a quality bar that is set in those two industries as a minimum. In general, I think I think as Gen Z ages and they they start to become loyal to certain brands where there always has been a really good, solid core product there. And they will tolerate for a brand like that innovation around it, where sometimes that innovation fails. Sometimes the product just, you know, the add on that they built, the new widget, it just sucked, it broke. It didn't do anything of value. I mean, we drew it. I think there'll be there'll be a level of loyalty around that. The challenge is, is if you're brand new into the marketplace and you're addressing effectively your addressable marketplace for the first time and you put a product out there and it's it's just not good. You might you probably will get a second chance, but you've just made that second chance much tougher to live with. So there is, I think, an element of get your MVP right first before you put it in the marketplace. The fail fast thing comes and fail fast is good, but fail fast comes with with with a marketplace that trusts you to some extent because they'll they'll give you the license to fail. And people, again, with Gen Z being technologically very smart and very savvy, knowing how some of this stuff works and how the development cycles work and so on, it's no longer the mystery that it is to older generations that haven't been in tech. They're prepared to tolerate a little bit of fail fast. But yeah, but still, I would I would say don't put a bad first MVP out there. That makes a lot of sense. Now, one question that actually goes all the way back to from the start. What is maybe one thing that people, either a blind spot or that people get wrong fairly common about Gen Z, like a misconception or something like that that you found? This is for a feature book, OK, but and it's completely off the topic of tech and finance. There is a ton of it's it's good media story, good media coverage. So they love writing about this stuff. A lot of stories that Gen Z is somehow mentally much more fragile than than prior generations. And I absolutely don't think that's a good thing. And I absolutely don't believe that to be the case. I think the the big difference between Gen Z and prior generations is that they are more open about mental health issues. So as you and I were told to suck it up, work 80 hours, you know, what's the issue? You know, be a man, grow up, grow up all that kind of, you know, inappropriate language that was used when we were young. And Gen Z saying, no, no, no, no, no, we reject. They're rejecting, they're rejecting that approach because it does lead to negative mental health outcomes, and they're just much more open about that. And I think that's a big misunderstanding. And there's a whole section of the media that likes to poke fun and ridicule. But I don't believe there's any any substantive difference in the in the mental in the overall mental resilience of Gen Z versus any other generation. We're still all humans. We're still all from the same DNA core. Nothing's fundamentally changed. It's good to know. Just the just the openness, just the openness. I think it's a good thing. I think that's a good thing. It's a really good thing. Yeah, I think that's I mean, it that is something that that's that's for that's a whole other book. And another topic is that there is that value of of having that openness and talking about the things that are important instead of just say, all right, we're just going to suck it up. It's it's sort of the it is. It goes back to the whole product thing is, you know, I think we Gen X and boomers and the older generations, a lot of stuff. We're like, you know, we we accept that we're going to go along and get along. Sometimes we're like, OK, this isn't great, but we're going to find a way to make it work. And they're more like, no, we don't have to. So we're not going to. We're going to demand better. And, you know, that can be off putting initially if you're the one that they're demanding more of. But it's also going to make you better because you're going to you're going to do something better. You're going to say, oh, you're right. This is a subpar MVP. We're going to we shouldn't have done that. We should have gotten this right. And, you know, we'll go get this stuff right. Well, I'd say I'd say as you got the way the way I would look at that, for example, in the workplace is, is there is there's likely to be more balanced in the workplace without necessarily, you know, this is probably where we're probably seeing a bit of a resurgence in unionisation and also union action right now, because because especially with low unemployment, people are feeling more empowered to push back against employers and to, I'd say, I mean, I certainly don't want to get into politics of this, but level the playing field or level the negotiating position of the parties, you know, kind of capital and labour. It's very, very Marxist old concept, that is. But but Gen Z in the wrong way, I prepared to push back. So there was an interesting article I read recently that, you know, Gen Z quite clearly saying that when the working day is over, the working day is over and they want to be able to clock off and have a personal life and have a family life and have, you know, a social life that where it's not constantly interrupted or the working day doesn't constantly go into into that part of their life. So that's one example. And another example is when companies talk about being like a family or empowering and empowering family values, that's actually a significant turnoff for Gen Z, because what they're hearing is we're going to push the boundaries way too far and treat you like and treat you like family, but not in a good way. And I have this kind of slightly weird relationship with you as opposed to a professional, you know, we want you to do some work for us. Here's some money. I mean, that professional relationship. So so the, you know, the way that one way the one big corporate family thing doesn't doesn't do well, actually. That's not a message that does well with Gen Z, generally speaking. That's a good little that's a good little nugget there to, you know, to in this case, sort of to wrap up on it, because I think that is something that it is. It very much has an appeal to different generations, but obviously not the youngest. Now, as we've been talking through all of this, there's we haven't touched a whole lot on on on your background or some of the stuff you do. But obviously, you've got a book. You've got another book coming out. A lot of interesting ideas and concepts, particularly anything, you know, anything related into the financial services and financial world. What's the best way for people to get a hold of you? Oh, my I'm all social. I'm all social. So on Instagram and TikTok, they'll find me at author Mark Bolton. That's my that's my my handle there. I'm on LinkedIn. Got a big professional presence on LinkedIn. And all of those places will lead to my website and they lead to each other. So that's the best way to get a hold of me is that way. And they'll find an email address and a phone number as well. If anyone wants to talk to me that way. If anybody's old and uses those ways to communicate. All right. Well, thank you so much. This has been this has been great, as as I said beforehand, I say, you know, you start with that introduction and things go off and running. So thank you so much for time and coming out and spending some time with us. Thank you, Robin. It's great. It's a real pleasure. Nice to meet you. And that will wrap it up. Now, first and foremost, if you happen to be one of these Generation Z people we've been talking about for this episode and the discussion before that, I would love to hear from you whether you agree or disagree. Hey, at some point, maybe you want to come on and offer a rebuttal, basically, to his discussion, or maybe you want to confirm it. It's one of those things that it's always good to get a couple of different voices, particularly those that we are talking about, to give us some information straight from the horse's mouth. Because, again, as I mentioned a couple of times, this is the next group. You know, the Gen X and Gen Y are starting to sort of get into their the latter years of their careers, while Gen Z is starting to really step in and make their presence known. So this is going to be something we're going to work with for the next few years, to say the least. We are not done, though. We're going to come back next episode with a special topic. We have more interviews coming up as we go into the next year. Getting close to wrapping up this season, though, probably a couple more speakers, a couple more interviews, a couple of episodes, and we will wrap this one up. But never fear, next episode, we will come back with some new content, something more for you to ponder and help you become a better developer. Till then, go out there and have yourself a great day, a great week, and we will talk to you next time. Thank you for listening to Building Better Developers, the Develop-a-Nor podcast. You can subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, Amazon, anywhere that you can find podcasts. We are there. And remember, just a little bit of effort every day ends up adding into great momentum and great success. Please check out school.develop-a-nor.com. That is where we are starting to pour a lot of our content. We've taken the lessons, the things that we've learned, all of the things that make you a better developer, and we're putting it there. We have a range of courses from free short courses up to full paid boot camps. All of these include a number of things to help you get better, including templates, quick references, and other things that make you better. We have a range of courses from free short courses up to full paid boot camps. All of these include a number of things to help you get better, including templates, quick references, and other things that make you better.