Acorns' media site Grow to teach millennials how to invest

Acorns, the app that invests your spare change, has introduced a media site called “Grow”. The site, which features millennials and financial experts discussing personal finance,  aims to help millennials learn how to manage their finances. Grow reached 1.1m views in its first week using social media and email newsletters. Acorns hopes to accelerate its growth and is exploring syndication deals.

Acorns wants millennials to start investing money, and also wants to help them learn how to manage their finances.

To that end, the investment platform has launched a media site called Grow that features millennials and financial experts — and some millennials who are themselves financial experts — discussing personal finance.

The site officially launched January 6.

Acorns is already popular — it has some 1.35 million customers, according to the company — and it has even bigger ambitions for Grow. “We want to reach Acorns users, and to be the money site for millennials,” said Editor Jennifer Barrett, formerly a personal finance editor at CNBC.

It’s not just millennials in need of financial education, it’s all Americans, Barrett told Bank Innovation shortly after Grow launched. “We have a huge financial literacy problem.” Millennials have it hardest because they’re new to the workforce, and often enter adulthood carrying a significant debt burden, Barrett said. “They lived through the Great Recession and saw the repercussions of making mistakes.”

Millennials want to do better — a recent study shows them outpacing older people in saving for retirement. Acorns is here to help them learn, and share their learnings.

Acorns is looking into syndication deals for Grow, Barrett said. It already has an impressive roster of personal financial management experts om it writing staff, and will be adding more. In its first week it reached 1.1 million viewers through the site, social media, and email newsletters. The site currently features written-word posts, but interactive video is next on the product roadmap, Barrett said, as well as interactive data and graphics produced by data journalists. A Money 101 series will also be a prominent feature of the site.

“We will feature practical stories, like how to negotiate your phone bill,” Barrett said. Now that’s an idea millions of Americans can get behind.

Learn more about financial education and millennials at Bank Innovation in Seattle. Request your invitation here.