When my mother’s health began failing, she let me take over her finances, with the caveat that I continue to balance her checkbook. By hand. A member of the silent generation who came of age when banks were able to require a male co-signer if a woman wanted to open an account, Mom felt better seeing her balance down to the penny — nevermind my abysmal grades in math.
My husband, born at the tail end of the baby boom, prefers to drive to the nearest ATM, all the way across town, to deposit checks, even though the app I installed on his phone lets him accomplish this with a couple of photos and a few clicks. And the night my Gen Z son left for an internship abroad, I asked him if he remembered the PIN for his debit card. He looked at me as if I’d asked him to pack a phonograph or a sundial.
He didn’t remember, because he never uses cash. His wallet is his phone. So just in case he came across a point-of-sale machine that required a PIN, on the way to the airport we drove to that same ATM to pull out some cash, and I quickly added him as an authorized user to one of my credit cards and provisioned that card on his cell phone. That’s because I’m Gen X — born into the analog, now wired for the digital.
Across four generations in my own family, you can see just how differently we think about money, trust and technology. More than other generations, the digitally native Gen Zers are reshaping our approach to money and financial health and security, but they’re not the only generation rewriting the rules. Each cohort interacts with the financial world in ways shaped by its moment in history, in turn shaping financial behaviors that illuminate our hopes, reflect our anxieties, signpost our trust.
A Deloitte survey showed that Gen Z was three times as likely as baby boomers to fall for online scams — though boomers, with more accumulated wealth, lost more money on average. Younger consumers are also far more willing to switch banks; Gen Z changes financial providers two to three times more often than their Gen X or boomer parents, sometimes losing track of accounts and services as they bounce between institutions. And while boomers own the lion’s share of businesses, Gen Z and millennials start enterprises earlier and with more confidence, inspired by the creator economy, which is younger than they are.
“The future of financial services can’t be built for the storied ‘average consumer,’” Bunita Sawhney, Mastercard’s chief consumer products officer, tells me. “When we understand why and how different generations navigate their financial lives, we can build tools, services and systems flexible enough to serve all of them.”
