The Victorian government on Sunday announced a decision to ban the promotion of banking products to students by banks.
Programs such as Dollarmites, which were promoted by the Commonwealth Bank, will not be a part of the furniture in the Victorian school system next year.
Victoria’s education minister, James Merlino, said in a media release that financial literacy is already taught through the school curriculum and the involvement of banks at the school level appears to not have assisted in the growth of that financial literacy at all.
One might argue that there is some merit in learning to actively save but that can happen in the home with parents supervising their child’s banking using their preferred bank. Banks involving themselves at school level can be an absurd piece of product placement.
It has been observed by journalists and others that these programs have, like other commission-based scenarios, resulted in employees abusing the trust of parents and others by creating accounts for children to meet a key performance indicator.
The Victorian government’s intervention is timely and confirms that financial literacy is something that ought to be taught without the assistance of banks wanting to develop brand recognition and loyalty amongst a younger cohort.
Education systems ought to teach critical evaluation of market offerings and not condition children to be loyal to a particular brand by allowing those brands to be marketed to pupils.
Banks have plenty of other marketing opportunities out there and doing the school thing does not need to be one of them.