Unlike my generation, most young people’s first experience of currency won’t be going to the bank to meet with a bank manager or taking cash out of a machine. Their experience is digital: smart cards to pay for school lunches, gaming tokens to play their favourite console games.
It’s no surprise that digital assets have become part of the financial landscape they’re growing up in, 80% of young people have heard of them. Digital assets are no longer a fringe conversation. The horse has bolted; they’re here to stay. As a co-chair of the crypto and digital assets all-party parliamentary group (APPG), I’ve long been an advocate for the sector, and I’m proud to see the UK on the cusp of a digital finance revolution. It really is a pivotal moment.
One of the key questions now is how we equip young people to understand and engage with this new wave of digital finance. Recent research from the GSR Foundation and the London Foundation for Banking and Finance (LFBF) sets out to answer exactly that.
Their report, Key Themes in Financial Capability: Young People and Cryptocurrency, gives us the clearest picture I’ve seen yet of what young people think about digital assets and what we can do to meet the moment for them.
According to the research, awareness is near-universal; understanding isn’t. That 80% who’ve heard of digital assets is perhaps unsurprising given their prominence in online culture, but fewer than a quarter of young people (23%) said they were confident they understood how digital assets actually work.
That confidence isn’t evenly spread, either. Boys are more likely to report confidence than girls, and are nearly 10% more likely to have owned or used a crypto-related product. There’s also a troubling pattern along socioeconomic lines: young people from disadvantaged backgrounds are both more likely to engage with digital assets and less likely to have the financial literacy to do so safely.
But our young people aren’t naïve. Many expressed real scepticism towards dodgy influencers, alongside a clear-eyed awareness of market volatility, the risk of scams, and the current lack of consumer protections.
The genie isn’t going back in the bottle, and young people know it. Over half want to learn more about digital assets as part of their financial education. Tellingly, this sits in contrast to their support for a social media ban. Young people aren’t asking to be shielded from digital assets, they’re asking to be equipped to navigate them responsibly.
The research also shows that young people are clear about how they want to learn this: in school, from trusted experts and not from influencers, not from social media, not left to figure it out on their own. Unfortunately, the curriculum is struggling to keep up. It would be fair to say, as it stands, financial education completely ignores digital assets.
It would be a disservice to this generation if digital assets became just another arena where inequality repeats itself, following the same fault lines we’ve already seen in traditional financial capability. Financial exclusion starts early, the gaps in confidence and understanding this report uncovers aren’t something that emerges in adulthood, they’re already visible at 15. And wherever there’s a gap in awareness and understanding, there’s room for harm: scams, or malicious influencers with large followings.
Financial education must keep pace with innovation. Cryptocurrency and other emerging products should be addressed head-on, with a focus on protecting vulnerable groups, closing inequalities, and giving young people what they need to make informed decisions.
This government is committed to tackling inequality and driving social mobility, while also “securing the UK’s position as a world-leading financial centre in the digital age.” The key to both, at once, is a financial education system that’s fit for the future.
I’d encourage educators, financial services firms, and policymakers to engage with this report and ask what part they can play. The appetite is there among young people, and now so is the evidence. For my part, I’ll keep making the case through the crypto and digital assets APPG for digital assets to be treated as a genuine financial education priority – not to push young people toward speculation, but to make sure no one is left to navigate this landscape without the tools to do so safely.
The value of this research isn’t just in what it tells us; it’s in what we do next. That’s why I’m glad to hear the GSR Foundation, in partnership with LMAX, the Considered Ask, and Money Ready are already turning these findings into practical education programmes, with any luck, we’ll see digital assets on some curricula by the start of next year.
Time is of the essence. Young people aren’t waiting, they’re already there. Some 27% of 15–18-year-olds say they’ve engaged with at least one form of cryptocurrency-related product. The question is whether we meet them with good information or leave them to find it themselves.
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