When you combine a few dozen fertile young minds with a place called Catalyst Ranch in a city like Chicago, you’re bound to get a recipe for change. Filene’s 30 Under 30 group crashed the windy city earlier this month, bringing a bevy of ideas and leaving with an action plan for getting those ideas into real-life products.
We’ll post snippets of the product ideas over the next several weeks, but in the meantime we wanted to share a few of the suggestions (some outrageous and other stark) the group heard at their Illinois interlude.
- “The image of the saver needs to change,” says Peter Tufano, a Harvard Business School Professor and Filene Fellow. “We need to make it cool to save. It should be as easy to save as it is to buy a plasma screen at Best Buy,” he says. Bundling that ties a deposit habit to product usage, can help. “It’s like telling your kids that if they eat their vegetables the can get dessert.”
- Young Americans, 18- to 29-years-old, are more concerned about economic stability than any other political issue, including the war in Iraq, healthcare, and even the cost of college, says Anya Kamenetz, author of Generation Debt. It’s easy to see why. Fully 91% of college seniors have a credit card, with an average balance of $2,864, according to Kamenetz. That’s in addition to student loan debt, $23,600 on average/li>
- What does Gen Y want? Credit cards, says Susan Follick of PSCU Financial Services. And credit unions can fill a void by tailoring their offerings around good rates and better rewards. Data from Javelin Research show that Gen Y customers are already very satisfied with customer service, online features and grace periods, but they see room for improvement in rewards earned and interest rates offered in conjunction with card usage. More than Boomers and Gen Xers, young adults actually prefer merchandise from catalogs, even over cash back
There’s more to come in a forthcoming interim report from Filene, but the 30 Under 30 crew has broken into 10 small groups, each of which is forming, planning, and polishing a business plan around proposals as diverse as a young adult mortgage savings account, a nationwide recruiting network, and an incubator program for young volunteers.
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