Greenlight Launches Credit Builder for Teens

Greenlight Financial Technology has launched a credit builder for teens that’s designed to help parents raise financially smart kids.

With the Greenlight Family Cash Card, teens can build and manage their credit responsibly while parents can set flexible spending limits and get real-time purchase alerts, the company said in a Tuesday (Aug. 8) press release.

“At Greenlight, we’re committed to helping families build healthy financial futures, and we know credit is a big part of financial wellbeing,” Greenlight Co-Founder and CEO Tim Sheehan said in the release. “With Greenlight’s new credit builder, teens can easily build credit before they turn 18, setting them up with a strong financial foundation and better opportunities.”

This new credit builder helps solve the problem that 84% of teens age 18 to 19 have zero credit history, “making it difficult to start adulthood with financial independence,” the company said in the press release.

Greenlight has also found that 94% of parents agree that credit knowledge and skills are important for their teens’ futures, yet there is a dearth of tools and resources to educate them about credit. Nearly half of teens (49%) also report to have experienced significant financial stress and anxiety.

To help meet these challenges, the Greenlight app also features Level Up, a financial literacy game that offers credit lessons to empower teens with more financial knowledge and confidence, the release said. It also helps them track their spending and balances in real time.

Apart from credit education, the Family Cash Card also enables families to earn up to 3% cash back on all teen and parent purchases, per the release.

Greenlight debuted a debit card for kids in 2017 and placed it at the heart of a corporate mission to help children and young people become financially literate early in life, Sheehan told PYMNTS’ Karen Webster in an interview posted in June 2022.

Sticking kids in front of videos and websites and expecting them to learn how to use credit responsibly doesn’t work, Sheehan said at the time. Instead, he said, parents should have their children engage, take action and manage their own money.

“Guess what happens? Interesting questions come up that they ask the parent, which is fantastic,” Sheehan said.