New mobile banking app teaches children about financial literacy.

• Position: NEW PRODUCTS - HT Mobile Apps - Banker Jr

A MICHIGAN COMPANY HAS INTRODUCED A MOBILE APP that's designed to teach children--toddlers through preteens--about financial literacy. The app, called Banker Jr., also is designed to provide a way for banks to bring their brand to kids. The app is offered by HT Mobile Apps.

The app features an interactive register, which lets kids keep tabs on their spending history, set savings goals, virtually track allowance (rather than carrying and losing cash) and manage the same data from all devices. Games and fun are also built into the interactive app. Banks can give the app to their customers with youth savings accounts or as part of financial literacy efforts in their communities.

In 2012, Kathleen Craig, president of HT Mobile Apps and assistant vice president of consumer e-services at United Bank & Trust (assets: $884 million), Tecumseh, Mich., conjured a vision of presenting the bank's services and financial literacy efforts to children in a place in which she knew they would find it appealing: mobile.

The bank was rebranding paper check registers for its youth savings account and hoping kids would use them, but they didn't, Craig explains. "It made me wonder why we still give them paper when we have this interactive channel right in front of us." Since then, she has launched Banker Jr. and is showcasing it to several banks around the country.

Reflecting the digital times in which today's kids interact--from mobile and tablet to websites and...