Most millennials would rather go to the dentist than listen to their bank, according to a recent three-year survey from the Millennial Disruption Index.
A majority of millennials also think that, in five years, the way we access money will have completely changed. They believe this innovation will come from outside the industry, and hope to see new banking products from companies like Google, Amazon, and Apple.
A write-up of the survey in the National Journal notes that this is luring community banks into the millennial market. One community bank president reworked her entire layout to be more millennial-friendly, and started up an active Twitter account. She began handing out her cell-phone to be more accessible to customers.
This shirking of banks does not, however, mean that millennials are rejecting materialism: “Seventy-eight percent of the millennials from the UBS survey indicated that income was an important ingredient to a good life, and they identified $220,000 as the average income it would take to be considered “successful.””
Although the National Journal write-up ties all this to remnants of the Occupy Wall Street movement, it also likely springs from the fact that banks have been slow to innovate and keep up with the demands of a mobile generation. In the age of PayPal and Venmo, (and Dogecoin) banks are straggling behind.
