PKO Junior Mobile Banking: Till You Turn 13…

“Our main objective for the kid app was to provide all PKO Junior functions on a smartphone. Kids can now use mobile banking thanks to the innovative app matching their age and preferences. By using the app under the guidance of adults, kids will acquire practical skills of handling mobile bank accounts, personal budgets and savings, and learn a systematic approach,” said Michał Macierzyński, Deputy Director of the Mobile and Online Banking Centre.

In addition to the core functionality of viewing the account balance, kids can create virtual piggy banks in the app to put away money towards a specific goal: they can name their piggy banks, select (or upload) piggy bank icons, define the amount and duration of savings, and put money in the piggy bank.  

Young clients can also initiate money transfers, all of which have to be approved by a parent in the iPKO transactional service. The functionality allows kids to define recipients, who also approved by a parent. Parents can turn the money transfer functionality on or off. The function is off by default for kinds under 10 years of age.  

Parents can set financial challenges for kids in four areas: responsibility, planning, regularity, and perseverance. The parents define the challenge duration and the award (taking a trip together to an interesting place, a gift, cash, or other prize defined by the parent).

The kid can decide whether or not to accept a challenge.   Kids can also get an achievement badge for creating piggy banks, making regular payments into the bank account, long-term savings, planning or putting away a given amount within a time limit defined by the kid. The badge award is communicated on the home page and in a dedicated section of the app.  

The app also provides financial tools including:

Personalising the Service and Mobile Phone Top-ups  

Kids can personalise the layout of the service depending on their preferences (wallpapers, photos, sounds) and use the friendly login function where they are not required to remember their client identifier to log in.

The app supports mobile phone top-ups. Initiated by the kid, they must be approved by the parent whose account is linked with the kid’s account (similar as for money transfers). In this section, kids can order a top-up, add a recipient, order a top-up based on predefined data, and check the status of top-ups requested of the parent.  

Kids can check any operation entered in the mobile app in the PKO Junior online service (and vice versa). All such operations must be approved by a parent (using the iPKO Parent App transactional service), who has full access to viewing the kid’s account.  

The app sends notifications which pop up when the parents approve an event, a badge is awarded, new functionalities are added to the service, as well as on the kid’s birthday. Notifications are at each time displayed on the home page until they are closed by the kid.  

How to Use the App?  

The PKO Junior app is available to kids who are PKO Child Account holders. The app is available on mobile phones with operating systems Android 2.3, iOS 7.1 and Windows Phone 8.0 (also Windows 10 Mobile) or higher. To find the app, type “PKO Junior” in your online store (Google Play, App Store, Windows Phone Store). The app requires no activation: to use it, log in first to the PKO Junior online service (users cannot first log in the app by using the initiating password). After installation, start the app by clicking the icon on your phone screen; after the main screen pops up, enter the client identifier / friendly login and the password to log in the app.  

Using PKO Junior is very simple. To open a PKO Child Account (PKO Junior offer), the parent must hold a checking and savings account with PKO Bank Polski, used to support the kid’s account in the iPKO online banking service. If you are not a PKO Bank Polski client, just open any account offered by the bank, such as the PKO Parent Account. The PKO Child Account is maintained free of charge and offers an attractive interest rate of 2.5% p.a. up to PLN 2,500 (interest compounded weekly).  

The Puls Biznesu and Bankier.pl banking service quality audit ranked iPKO and the IKO mobile app very high. A score of 71.9 points for ergonomics, convenience, and utility was nearly 10 points higher than that of the peers. According to statistics, the number of online and mobile banking users keeps growing steadily: 3.41 million clients log in iPKO at least once per month, including 1.34 million users logging in the mobile service alone.

***