The Captain Marvel of money education
Rob Stock meets the humble innovator who has become a financial superhero to a generation of Kiwis.
Every DC or Marvel superhero has an origin story, wears a badge on their chest, and finds their identity entwined with that of their masked alter-ego. New Zealand’s champion money educator Kendall Flutey, founder of Banqer, may not wear a mask, but she ticks all the other boxes that characterise cartoon heroes and heroines.
When asked to speak about the journey that has seen 85,000 primary and intermediate schoolchildren taught about money on Banqer software, Kendall spoke of her ‘‘origin story’’, echoing the jargon of the world of superheroes where the likes of Wonder Woman and Batman have a back-story telling how they came to wear the bullet-proof bracelets or cape.
In Flutey’s case there’s no dark night in a foggy alley, or the bite of a radioactive spider – it was a conversation she had with her much-younger brother just over five years ago, when he came home enthused after a money lesson from an inspiring intermediate school teacher.
‘‘His teacher was financially educating him in class, and he had hit the mark completely. My brother was so engaged asking me about taxes, about companies, about insurance. For a 12-yearold kid that was groundbreaking for me.’’
She texted the teacher, one Micah Hocquard, who had recently won the Warehouse Stationery most inspiring teacher award, met him the following day, and the idea of Banqer was born in the head of the young coder from Christchurch.
She had found her mission: to help create future generations of New Zealanders with the financial skills to thrive and prosper, and hold banks, insurers and other money industries to account.
For a woman who’s spent five years in the media limelight, most recently for being named Young New Zealander of the Year, Flutey is still not used to fronting an audience, with her nervousness increasing in direct proportion to the number of ‘‘suits’’ she’s speaking to.
When asked by the Financial Services Council to give the 20-minute ‘‘self-indulgent’’ talk about her origin story and journey, her stomach was in knots.
‘‘What 22- to 37-year-old wouldn’t like that opportunity? I’ll tell you who. This one,’’ she told the suits massed at the Pullman Hotel in Auckland.
The limelight, she said, wasn’t her jam, drawing a laugh with a picture of herself in 2001 as a teenager exiting a room with her hand up to screen her face from the camera.
To some extent, Flutey has coped in public by assuming a different identity.
‘‘As a slightly reclusive introvert, it’s daunting to take off that purple Banqer t-shirt that some of you may have seen me in that I’ve been glued to for the last five years, and that I’ve somewhat been able to hide behind,’’ she said.
The conversation with her younger brother came at a serendipitous moment for Flutey. She had just been through what she called a ‘‘quarter-life crisis’’, ditched her entry-level accounting job, put herself through a coding boot camp, and landed a job she loved in coding, but felt an urge to change the world.
The crisis was prompted by realising that she had no passion for accounting, and that the definition of ‘‘success’’ that had guided her was wrong.
‘‘I had a firm attachment to what I thought success was,’’ she recalled.
‘‘It was a really simple equation, a little naive. A good education, a prestigious job, and wealth.’’
By her third week as an accountant, she had a Wizard of Oz moment.
‘‘It was as though the man behind the curtain had been revealed,’’ she said.
‘‘This wasn’t my passion. This wasn’t my calling, and I lacked the drive as a result. It was clear I wouldn’t thrive professionally or personally in that environment.’’
She looked back over the decisions that had taken her to this crisis point, and realised she’d made few, if any, active choices as she rode the ‘‘conveyor belt of education’’ towards a low-risk, palatable future, and believes that in this sense she had been little different from many in her generation.
‘‘We place a lot of trust in the system, and assume it is going to take us to a destination that’s going to satiate us,’’ she said.
‘‘It’s a lot easier to go through life not making choices.
‘‘The irony is that’s the worse choice you can make, handing over your agency.’’
After seeing what was behind the curtain, Flutey made a flurry of choices.
She quit her job without a new one to go to, acquired her coding skills, and gave herself the luxury of time to work out what success really meant to her.
One consequence was more than a few nights sleeping on friends’ couches: ‘‘I could no longer afford to pay rent.’’
When she met Hocquard, who remains a pedagogy adviser to Banqer to this day, Flutey was back in work, coding for a living, working with clients such as NZX and several banks, and liking the work.
But she now imagined a future in which children learned to be financially capable in school, and didn’t get spilled out into higher education or the workforce, at the mercy of the powerful banks and insurance companies.
She felt that her coding skills could help reduce inequality, and make the country a happier place.
‘‘A few weeks after, I quit my job.’’
The acts of a few can change the course of a nation or the world, Flutey said. ‘‘Over the past five years through our financial education software, I have been able to slowly, but surely try and chip away at that world, that future that I really want for our nation, one where individuals aren’t financially misled, disadvantaged, or deceived, one where there’s collective prosperity, and educated participants are forcing the market to operate efficiently and effectively.’’
Flutey called education ‘‘the enemy of poverty’’. Her idea of what wealth meant has changed since she walked out of the accountancy office.
‘‘The word wealth has been exploited over the centuries. It’s lost its roots, its origins. The definition of wealth used to be wellbeing. To be wealthy meant to be well.’’
It’s not a selfish definition either. To Flutey it is the idea of collective wellbeing, not a narrow striving for personal wellbeing at the expense of others, that is true wealth.
‘‘For decades, we have been behaving in ways that benefit us, our immediate circle, often at the expense of others. I did it.’’
It may be that the idea had roots in her Nga¯ i Tahu and Nga¯ ti Kahungunu heritage, said Kendall, whose ‘‘mixed bag’’ whakapapa includes Welsh, English and Scottish ancestry.
But she stresses Banqer is not only her. It is Hocquard as well. And her life partner, and Banqer chief operating officer Simon Brown, and the six other fulltime Banqer staffers.
Banqer has just expanded into high schools having started in primary and intermediate schools, where 2500 teachers have used it with their classes.
It also launched a te reo Ma¯ ori version of its online programme and has taken the fight to Australia, where Flutey reports educators have been wary since evidence emerged of bad banking behaviour reached down into the nation’s schools.
Commonwealth Bank of Australia’s Dollarmites programme for schools came in for criticism as it was revealed that not only was the bank paying commission to schools based on the numbers of their students who opened accounts, but that accounts were opened in children’s names by bank staff keen to hit sales targets, even when the children had not asked for them.
Kendall has become a heroine for some advocates of private enterprise over government programmes.
Its expansion, via private capital, has outstripped the taxpayer-funded programme under development from the Commission for Financial Capability.
Banqer is a private company that makes its money through two mechanisms.
The first is through subscriptions paid for through school donations. When that proved successful in wealthier areas, but resulted in too few schools from less affluent suburbs signing up, Banqer found champions like Kiwibank and the Insurance Council to ‘‘sponsor’’ schools that lacked the money to pay.
Banqer is not going to turn Flutey into a multimillionaire.
‘‘We are a private company, but we don’t behave like a fully profit-driven company,’’ she said.
Banqer profit, and community wealth are the dual measures of the company’s success.
‘‘The word wealth has been exploited over the centuries. It’s lost its roots, its origins. The definition of wealth used to be wellbeing. To be wealthy meant to be well.’’ Kendall Flutey, founder of Banqer