The collision of times and crowds outlines the portraits of different generations.
Generation Z, a group born at the turn of the century (1995-2009), grew up in the era of China's rapid economic development and the rapid rise of the mobile Internet, with a variety of life conditions and value orientations, flourishing in the cultural collision of freedom and love, mainstream and personality, and this circle has also become the key research object of various industries because of the most consumption potential.
In terms of financial management, they also show different generational characteristics. According to the "Generation Z Research Report" recently released by Ping An Securities, Generation Z has the characteristics of early age, platformization, fundization, socialization and diversification, and their financial management concepts tend to seek victory in stability and decentralized allocation, with the main purpose of cultivating financial habits and earning pocket money, and the overall characteristics of high growth are displayed.
How does Generation Z advance on the road to financial management, and what advice do they have in the face of the financial science content provided by financial institutions?
On the occasion of the 515 National Investor Protection Publicity Day, Yiwealth launched a survey for Gen Z in first- and second-tier cities and launched the "2023 Generation Z Educational Content Demand Insight Report" to discover the demand trends of the new generation of young people for educational content.
Investment is the realization of cognition
Born between 1995 and 2009, Generation Z is a very young group between the ages of 14 and 28. From the perspective of investment and financial management preferences, Generation Z generally shows the characteristics of not having much experience, seeking stability in "product selection", and preferring to buy products on third-party financial management platforms.
According to the survey data, 72% of Gen Z have less than 3 years of financial experience, and only 5% of players have 5-10 years of rich financial experience. From the perspective of product selection, Generation Z prefers low-risk products such as monetary funds and bank wealth management, and the strategy of "winning in stability" has also played a relatively good effect, survey data shows that 47.8% of Generation Z investment and financial management have income, 25.4% do not lose or earn, only 26.8% said there is a loss, the return performance is better than expected. In the choice of product purchase channels, third-party wealth management platforms are favored by Generation Z, with 65% of Gen Z taking it as the preferred channel for purchasing products, far ahead of banks, brokers, funds and other financial institutions.
As more and more Gen Z join the financial army, financial content begins to penetrate into the daily life of Gen Z: swipe a short financial video on the commute; When doing housework, put on a live broadcast of financial management as a background sound; Lie in bed before going to bed and look at a financial public account...
The above scene depicts the current situation of young people's financial literacy learning - using the fragmented time in their lives to quickly obtain financial information.
How much time do Gen Zers spend on average each week learning about investing? According to the survey, 22.2% of Generation Z study less than 1 hour per week, 32.8%, 32.3% and 10% of 1-2 hours, 2-3 hours and 3-5 hours per week, respectively, and only 2.6% study more than 5 hours per week.
Although the investment threshold is lowering, a high level of awareness is still required to obtain good returns. The survey found that from the perspective of the return on investment knowledge learning, the longer the learning time, the higher the probability of positive return, when the learning time exceeds 5 hours, the probability of positive return rises sharply to 77.8%, while the probability of negative return drops to 5.6%.
It is not difficult to see that learning investment knowledge and improving professional ability has significantly helped to improve returns. For financial institutions, accompanying the growth of users may not be effective in the short term, but will be beneficial in the long run to improve the investment experience and enhance the life cycle value of users.
Generation Z has three major preferences: live IP, live broadcast, and sitcom
With the increase of educational content supply institutions, the abundance of expressions such as videos, and the variety of educational content, what kind of content is Generation Z most interested in?
The survey found that investment strategies/skills, personal wealth management planning knowledge, and new products and policies ranked among the top three most interesting content for Gen Z, with average interest scores of 8.38, 7.73, and 7.71 (out of 10). In terms of expression forms, videos, live broadcasts, and sitcoms interpreted by real people such as investment consultants and institutional employees are the most popular. In fact, live-action IP videos have always been favored because they are more authentic and interactive. Yiwealth Research Institute observed that many financial institutions in the market have built a real IP content matrix and achieved good communication results, such as Everbright Securities, Ping An Securities, Huaxia Fund, Wells Fargo Fund, Huaan Fund, etc.
As Internet natives, Generation Z uses social media platforms such as WeChat, Douyin, Kuaishou and Xiaohongshu as commonly used information channels. According to the survey data, in addition to professional financial management platforms such as financial institution APP and third-party wealth management APP, 59.7% of Generation Z said that they would watch investment and education content on social media platforms.
At the same time, more and more financial institutions have also begun to open accounts on social media platforms to publish relevant content. Taking Douyin as an example, as of the end of April 2023, the occupancy rate of securities firms and fund institutions was 56% and 64% respectively. The addition of professional institutions has given more "hardcore knowledge" to platforms that were originally based on life-oriented entertainment content, and financial institutions will also consider how to make "hardcore knowledge" more interesting and understandable when exporting content on such platforms.
Living in a rich material environment, Generation Z was once misunderstood as a person who consumes irrationally, but careful in-depth research found that they love to do strategies before shopping, love to shop around, and know every penny they spend, and in terms of investment and financial management, Generation Z also continues this characteristic. According to the survey results, 64.1% of Gen Z investors will need to invest in educational content when making major investment and financial decisions. Therefore, the product pages of financial institutions are often equipped with rich content to assist them in their investment decisions.
Financial institutions still need to work hard to reduce the content dimensionality
What do Gen Z think about the educational content offered by financial institutions? According to the survey, Generation Z is more satisfied with the content of financial institutions, with an average satisfaction score of 8.36 (out of 10). The survey found that satisfaction is also highly correlated with the level of investment income, and the average satisfaction of Generation Z who made a lot of money in the past year was as high as 9.21, and the average satisfaction of Generation Z who made a small profit on the content was 8.62, both higher than the average.
The survey found that Gen Z already has a certain understanding of investment risks. The data shows that 87.5% of Gen Z believe that risk and return are proportional most of the time, and individuals should choose the right product according to their investment needs; 67.7% of Gen Z investment styles prefer long-term holding friends for time, while the proportion of long-term negative returns (25.1%) is lower than that of technical people who earn volatile returns (negative returns account for 30.5%). This also shows that financial institutions and financial KOLs have achieved initial results in cultivating investors' healthy investment values in recent years.
The survey results show that although 81% of Gen Z said that they are more willing to pay attention to the educational content released by professional financial institutions, 19% of Generation Z are more willing to watch the content released by financial big V, mainly because they think that the content provided by institutions is boring, not as interesting as financial KOLs (50%) or involves too many product recommendations (39.3%), 28.6% of them are not interested, and 25% of Generation Z believe that the educational content of financial institutions is too basic.
The main problem with the unpopularity of content in financial institutions is still that it is difficult to understand and boring, which may indicate that professional content still has a long way to go.
Different from the long-term investment values that are widely accepted, the fixed investment and personal pension content that financial institutions focus on publicizing are not satisfactory in actual effect. Survey data show that more than half of Generation Z has not yet formed a fixed investment habit, and about ninety percent of Generation Z have not yet purchased personal pension products, of which 48.7% are on the sidelines, 19.5% said they have no intention to buy, and 20.9% do not know personal pension.
This also shows from the side that the two types of content released by financial institutions have failed to accurately reach Generation Z, or failed to successfully impress them to "pay" for it, which is also worth financial institutions to continue to think deeply about how to better guide young people from knowledge to action.
Remarks: A total of 2104 samples were collected in this survey, of which half were male and female; Post-95s account for 70%, post-00s account for 30%; First-tier cities and new first-tier cities accounted for 70%, and second-tier cities accounted for 30%.
About Yiwealth SMI
Yiwealth Research Institute launched the Yiwealth Social Media Index (Yiwealth SMI) in 2022, starting from the dimensions of fan accumulation, content creation, content dissemination, user interaction and other dimensions, statistically analyzing the comprehensive performance of brokers, funds, and banks on social media platforms (Douyin, Video, Official Account, Zhaocai, Fortune), and finally making a monthly social media index list. To reflect the cross-domain operation trend of financial institutions and the influence of social media platforms. About YiwealthYiwealthYiwealth is a wealth management information intelligent operation service provider under Yingfan Technology (a mixed-ownership new-generation enterprise controlled by Yicai), providing cross-platform and multi-scenario financial information intelligent operation services for the wealth management industry.
Based on rich domain database resources, financial expert pool resources and professional financial capabilities, Yiwealth outputs two major solutions: intelligent content operation and social marketing, helping financial institutions achieve refined operation and accurate reach of users, and effectively achieve wealth management business growth.
（Yiwealth）