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Victoria bans bank marketing in schools

CHOICE welcomes the decision to end bank marketing programs such as Dollarmites in Victorian schools.
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Checked for accuracy by our qualified fact-checkers and verifiers. Find out more about fact-checking at CHOICE

Last updated: 30 Nov 2020
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UPDATE 25/10/21: Commonwealth Bank drops Dollarmites program

Bank marketing programs such as Commonwealth Bank’s Dollarmites will be banned in Victorian schools from 2021, Education Minister James Merlino has announced. Instead, students will participate in school-led programs designed to improve financial literacy. 

At CHOICE, we’ve long campaigned for the scrapping of these programs, which are little more than thinly veiled marketing ploys designed to lock customers in from an early age.

Marketing programs like this have no place in schools

Alan Kirkland, CHOICE CEO

We even awarded Dollarmites a Shonky in 2018 for its shifty tactics. These included thousands of Commonwealth Bank staff fraudulently manipulating Dollarmites youth accounts for personal financial gain, and inappropriate promotion of credit cards to primary-school-aged children. 

“Marketing programs like this have no place in schools,” says CHOICE CEO Alan Kirkland. “If we want children to develop financial literacy, this should be through evidence-based education, free from advertising.”

Research we carried out in 2017 found that almost half (46%) of people got their first account with Commonwealth Bank and a third kept this account into adulthood. 

“CHOICE has never been able to find any evidence that programs like the Dollarmites have any impact on long-term savings habits,” says Kirkland.

“The only impact they have is to give the Commonwealth Bank a steady stream of young customers, many of whom stick with the Commonwealth later in life.”

Victoria has led the way – now others must follow

At CHOICE, we welcome this decision and call on other state and territory governments to follow Victoria’s lead and ban these marketing programs. 

“The big banks are powerful institutions, so it’s great to see a state government willing to take on the largest bank in Australia to do the right thing by kids,” says Kirkland. “Now we need federal parliamentarians to show the same kind of courage and resist the banking lobby’s calls to axe safe lending laws.”

Alice

I'm a content creator and marketer here at CHOICE – which basically just means that I write stuff. CHOICE's testing is so comprehensive that we publish vast amounts of data on all the products we test. We know that not everyone likes to wade through numbers to find the best product, so my job is to take the data and translate it into something more easily digestible for readers who are time-poor or just want to know the best products to buy – and which to avoid. I also get to dream up fun ways of taste-testing products, like the Tim Tam challenge and the Democracy Sausage taste test. I write about all kinds of things, from health insurance to heaters and BBQs to bargain-hunting, so each day is different and I'm lucky that I get to learn about all the different things CHOICE does to help consumers.

I'm a content creator and marketer here at CHOICE – which basically just means that I write stuff. CHOICE's testing is so comprehensive that we publish vast amounts of data on all the products we test. We know that not everyone likes to wade through numbers to find the best product, so my job is to take the data and translate it into something more easily digestible for readers who are time-poor or just want to know the best products to buy – and which to avoid. I also get to dream up fun ways of taste-testing products, like the Tim Tam challenge and the Democracy Sausage taste test. I write about all kinds of things, from health insurance to heaters and BBQs to bargain-hunting, so each day is different and I'm lucky that I get to learn about all the different things CHOICE does to help consumers.

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