SoFi Blog

By Tony Morosini, VP of Banking

There’s no question deposit accounts are having a moment. In a rising rate environment, banks earn an increasing yield on the deposits they hold, and these additional proceeds can often go directly to earnings. To gather more deposits, banks fight to get consumers to switch banks, but it’s a tough sell because changing banks is painful.

While lots of institutions are offering deals to entice people to move their accounts, they haven’t invested in making the consumer experience as good as it should be. People have been using and managing money online at scale for 20 years, and we’ve now gotten to a place where people are not just comfortable with handling money online, but they expect it. The traditional financial institutions have improved on some marks, like improving their mobile experiences (or at least creating one at all), but there’s still a lot of space to tackle.

Earlier this month, we shared results from our 2017 Millennials and Financial Resolutions survey. We discovered several trends and recent events that impact how millennials are thinking about forward-thinking financial topics. This week, we review the results of a second survey we conducted to learn why these young professionals aren’t reaching their financial goals, and how they compare to other generations.

In her book The Art of Money, author and therapist Bari Tessler writes, “We conflate it with our identity, our sense of worth, our definitions of success and maturity.” The “it” she writes of is money— specifically the concept of “money shame”—but she could easily be writing about sex.

In fact, money may actually be a greater taboo than sex today.