Financial literacy is crucial to young people's future. But how financially literate are young people today, and how can they prepare for the economic challenges of tomorrow? To answer these questions, we interviewed Jessica Thyrion, advisor at the ABBL Foundation for Financial Education. In this article, she shares her expertise on the importance of financial education, the specific challenges facing young people, and the initiatives in place to help them navigate the complex world of finance. Find out how the ABBL Foundation is working to improve young people's financial literacy and prepare them to make informed and responsible decisions.
Happy birthday S-Net!
This month, the overhauled S-Net mobile app celebrates its fourth birthday! If today, we can no longer imagine a world without mobile phones or applications, let’s go back a few years and remember the birth and evolution of an application that, day after day, supports Spuerkeess customers in their adventures.
The creation of the first smartphone in 1992 was intended to make life easier for its users by offering functions such as messaging, calendar, web browsing and more. Thereafter, with the arrival of the first iPhone in 2007, mobile applications boomed. Versions 2 and 3 of the iPhone operating system already included the App Store, the now well-known application downloading platform, which was followed by Google Play for Android in 2008. By endorsing the basic objective, which was to improve user productivity and the clustering of information, applications were developed in all areas imaginable, even responding to needs that users had perhaps not felt before.
Luc Sinner: Spuerkeess launched its first S-Net app in 2011. The first version was still basic, but enabled our customers to carry out certain transactions. In 2014, Patric de Waha, a member of our IT development department, looked into the design in detail and proposed a complete overhaul of the app.
The idea was to create a mobile application that was easy and pleasant to use, offering a whole new plethora of functions, on the one hand to be closer to our customers, and on the other, to enable them to manage their financial situation in a modern manner. This is why, from the beginning, we called on design studio Apart to redesign the interface, a choice confirmed when it won the Luxembourg Design Award in 2017 and the German Design Award in 2018. In addition, we were the first on the market to launch PIN code and fingerprint identification.
Roger Krämer: The success of the application and above all of its design were such that we have subsequently integrated it into the desktop version. The S-Net project has in a manner of speaking initiated the Bank’s digital transformation process. What began with a small team of barely six people has today evolved into a separate entity, namely the Business Innovation Office, which is at the heart of all digital initiatives. Since then, we have put in place several new functions, such as:
Our new features cover several themes and are intended to facilitate and optimise the management of our customers’ budgets. Thus, Speedinvest is a digital and customised investment tool that is meant to be rapid and flexible! In the same spirit, MIA (My Intelligent Assistant) is the intelligent financial assistant that provides details on a customer’s financial situation, particularly on the use of a budget.