Conscious money management digitally and playfully – the MNB Student Safe mobile application has been renewed

12 May 2023

The Magyar Nemzeti Bank (MNB) and the Money Compass Foundation have launched an innovative joint initiative, the renewed Student Safe mobile application, to increase financial awareness among 8 to 14 year olds in the digital world. The updated version of the Student Safe mobile app, operated by the MNB and involving commercial banking partners, is now able to handle real money. Therefore, the Student Safe initiative is the first central bank digital currency pilot project in the European Union available to retail users.

The renewed version of Student Safe, the innovative financial and educational mobile application developed in a joint initiative of the Magyar Nemzeti Bank (MNB) and the Money Compass Foundation, has been released. The promotion of the Student Safe project has already been started in several Hungarian schools, and the mobile app is available to Hungarian students and their parents in the Apple App Store and Google Play Store.

The Student Safe mobile application focuses primarily on the 8-14 age group. A key objective of the MNB and the Money Compass Foundation is to improve young people’s financial literacy and to strengthen digital financial inclusion. In this context, the mobile app allows children to learn in a playful way by answering quiz questions on financial, digitalisation and sustainability topics. By successfully completing the quizzes, students can collect so-called student tallérs, that can be redeemed for webshop (eMAG) vouchers. In addition, the new Student Safe mobile app allows users to try out using money in a digital form, initiating transfers to bank accounts, saving money by setting goals that are important to them, and making purchases using SimplePay Instant Transfer QR code payments. In the mobile app, which can be used with parental supervision, parents can also support their children by sending regular, or one-off pocket money in the form of either forints or student tallérs.

In addition to the MNB, more than 100 central banks around the world are currently carrying out research concerning the possibilities of the introduction of central bank digital currencies and the parameters of their implementation. Student Safe is a pilot project of the MNB related to central bank digital currency (CBDC), developed in cooperation with Hungarian FinTech companies and commercial banks. The electronic money accounts of students and their parents are managed directly by the MNB; therefore, the Student Safe initiative is the first pilot project in the European Union in which the central bank involves retail users in gaining the experience needed for the research. Through the pilot, the mobile application is fine-tuned on an ongoing basis. Any comments on the use of the mobile application are welcome to be sent to diakszefapp@mnb.hu.

The renewed Student Safe is an improvement of the mobile app launched in 2020, also as a joint initiative of the MNB and the Money Compass Foundation. Over the past three years, thousands of students have used the Student Safe mobile app and have answered more than one million quizzes.