We Banned the Word 'Wallet'.
Dear Partners and Stakeholders,
Most fintechs build for kids the same way they build for adults — just smaller. We took a different route. Here's why.
Recently, our team went through a review of our Sticitt dictionary. Words we may and may not use in our business, and the tone we carry. One outcome was that we always use a positive tone. The world is a place filled with opportunity and possibility. Keeping a positive tone can only help create some optimism. On a local level, we decided to ban a very specific word. The word was 'wallet'. Easter-egg moment - If you find the word wallet anywhere in our marketing material, let us know, and you can win a prize 😉.
I know — it sounds petty. But every fintech product I had ever used had been described as a 'wallet', and the more we thought about it, the more it bothered us. A wallet is, fundamentally, a container for things you have stopped paying attention to. Loose change. Old receipts. Loyalty cards from coffee shops that have since closed. A wallet is the place where money goes to be forgotten about until you need it.
And here we were, building a financial product for children — for the most formative period of any human's relationship with money — and the entire industry's instinct was to call it a wallet. We felt like we were starting the conversation in the wrong place.
The problem with 'kids' products'
There is a category of fintech I want to challenge in this article, and I will be direct about it: the “kids' product” category, as it currently exists in most of global fintech, is patronising. It assumes children cannot handle real interfaces, so it uses cartoon ones. It assumes children cannot understand real numbers, so it uses fake currencies and 'stars'. It assumes parents want to shield children from financial reality, so it abstracts the financial reality into a game.
The result is that children using these products learn nothing transferable. They learn how to play a game inside an app. They do not learn how money actually works. And by the time they are old enough for the 'real' product, they have spent five years internalising the message that money is a game adults eventually let you play, which is precisely the wrong mental model for the world they are inheriting.
When we designed the Sticitt Account, we made a decision that was philosophically opposed to this entire approach. We decided to treat children as the adults they are going to become. That meant calling the product an 'account', not a 'wallet'. It meant showing real Rand values, not hearts or stars. It meant giving parents real-time visibility into real transactions, not a sanitised summary. It meant offering 4.2%* rewards on idle balances — the same way a real savings account would, just better; we pay it out daily so that the experience of compound growth became a lived reality, not a textbook concept.
A 9-year-old using Sticitt is not playing a money game. She is running a small financial life. The stakes are appropriately small. The mechanics are real. The transferable learning is enormous. Don’t believe us, go and read the book we authored on this topic - Money Habits that Stick.
What real visibility actually does
I want to share an interaction I had with a parent on our platform, because it captures the dynamic better than I could in the abstract. She emailed me — through our support team, but I read it personally — to express concern that her son had spent R85 in a single week on Slush Puppies. She wanted to know if there was a way to 'block the tuckshop from selling Slush Puppies'.
My team's response, which I helped draft, went something like this. We can absolutely set spending limits and category restrictions (which Parents can enable if they truly want). But before you do, consider what the R85 has just bought you.
It has bought you visibility. You now know, with precision, what your son's choices look like when he is making them on his own. That information is incredibly valuable. The R85 is a small price for it. You can use that knowledge to start a conversation. You can show him the dashboard. You can ask him whether he thinks R96 in Slush Puppies, in one week, was a good decision. You can ask him what else he might have wanted to spend that R96 on.
She wrote back two weeks later. They had had the conversation. He had voluntarily set himself a R30-a-week tuckshop budget. He had also asked her to help him set a savings goal for a Lego set he wanted, all using the Sticitt Account and app. That is a 9-year-old running a personal finance review with his mother, voluntarily, because the data and product experience made it possible. Compare that to the alternative — cash or generic bank cards, no visibility, no conversation, no learning. Just R96 of Slush Puppies that nobody noticed until the dentist's appointment.
The lesson my father taught me
When I was 14, my father sat me down with our family's actual budget. Not a kids' version. The real spreadsheet. He showed me what came in, what went out, where the pressure points were, and asked me where I would cut. I remember the shock of it. I had had no idea school fees cost what they cost. I had had no idea what petrol added up to in a month. I had had no idea what 'budget' actually meant in concrete terms.
That hour rewired my brain. By the time I left school, I had an instinctive understanding of trade-offs that most adults I now meet still do not have. Not because I was particularly bright — but because someone had treated me like an adult earlier than was strictly necessary. A huge part of why Sticitt exists is to scale that experience to all families. Most parents do not sit their 14-year-olds down with the family budget — for understandable reasons. But every parent on Sticitt through our Sticitt Account offering and application can sit their 9-year-old down with their own budget, every week, and have a meaningful educational conversation in five minutes. The dashboard does the work. The parent just shows up.
The bridge from school to home
This is the bigger architectural point that I want school decision-makers and parents alike to understand. The Sticitt Account is not a feature we tacked on to a payment platform. It is the central thesis of the whole company.
Schools are the most efficient entry point to a child's financial life and their financial confidence. They are the place where small, repeated transactions happen — tuckshop, uniform shop, fundraisers, sports — and where the habit-forming volume is high. By making payments at school cashless and visible, we create the data substrate on which parents can run real financial conversations at home.
The school benefits operationally. The parent benefits educationally. The child benefits generationally. That is the architecture. That is the whole product. We are not building a wallet. We are building a 30-year financial relationship that happens to start with a tuckshop sandwich.
If you are a parent at a Sticitt school, open the app this weekend. Sit with your child. Look at the dashboard together. Do not lecture. Do not judge. Just look. The conversation will start itself. That is the entire design.
When in doubt, paddle out.
Theo Kitshoff
Co-founder & CEO, Sticitt
*Linked to SA Repo rate
