Valley National Bancorp and ING Bank FSB say their child Web sites have generated tens of thousands of kid accounts and scored points with parents and teachers as well.
Valley, of Wayne, N.J., features its cartoon spokeskids, Val and Lee, on highway billboards and in TV commercials and a kids Web site. It is offering $10 to kids who open accounts online and $10 to those who already have Valley accounts and deposit that much from their holiday gifts.
Garret Nieuwenhuis, Valley's first senior vice president of marketing, said it decided to market to children after noticing that many were visiting its branches to use coin-counting machines.
On VNBKids.com, an educational Web site it started in 2003, Val and Lee give tips on managing allowance money. Visitors can also play games (including one involving a coin-counting machine) and watch movies. All the activities have a financial theme.
These efforts seem to be paying off. Mr. Nieuwenhuis said that about 52,000 of Valley's savings accounts - 28% of the total - are held by children. Their average age is 8, the median account balance is $391, and the total tops $80 million. A checking or debit card account product for preteens and teenagers is in the works.
Valley's strategy with this group includes sending branch employees to schools to help them develop financial education campaigns. Some children it signs up for accounts "bring the parents into the bank," Mr. Nieuwenhuis said. "We do an ongoing cross-sell, certainly, to the parents."
Chris Musto, a research vice president at Watchfire GomezPro in Waltham, Mass., said children "can subtly influence the financial decisions made by the head of the household."
Penny Gillespie, a senior analyst at Forrester Research Inc. of Cambridge, Mass., said kids are starting to bank and use debit cards at a younger age than in previous generations.
ING Bank FSB also uses school programs to promote its banking products to children and its Web site.
Laura Lubin Rossi, a spokeswoman for the Wilmington, Del., unit of the Dutch banking and insurance company ING Group NV, says ING Bank's marketing to kids in grades 4 through 8 includes giving them pointers about money management.
"When you ask parents who should be teaching them about money, they say the school, and when you ask the school, they say the parents," Ms. Lubin Rossi said. "The strategy really was to fill a void." The online banking company introduced its orangekids.com site for young people in 2002.
Ms. Lubin Rossi said that about 2,000 teachers have registered at the site to receive financial lesson plans ING offers. The site's reputation with educators has been growing through word of mouth, she said. "Teachers trust teachers about content."
ING says 110,000 people under 18 have opened accounts with ING online in the United States and that orangekids.com gets 700,000 hits a month. (ING has 2 million savings account customers in the United States.)
Fleet Bank, which Bank of America Corp. bought last year, created a site called Fleetkids.com that is still up. B of A does not have a similar site of its own; a spokeswoman for the Charlotte company, which is phasing out the Fleet name, said it is too soon to say whether Fleetkids.com will be rebranded.
Mr. Musto said that "typically, these kinds of sites - microsites within a larger Web site - are branding exercises." They can cast the bank as involved in the community and family-friendly, and they cost relatively little to build and maintain.
Promoting them in schools is "beautiful, from a bank's point of view," Mr. Musto said, since kids will tell their parents about the site and give the bank a little word-of-mouth advertising.
