Report to Society 2024

Social

Youth development

Making life easier for young people

The start of adult life can be a challenge for young people: Finding the right apprenticeship or the right degree programme, looking for their own flat – all of this takes up a lot of time and energy. As part of their social commitment, the savings banks therefore offer young people a range of support programmes at various levels. Above all, however, they are intended as a starting point for a financially independent and fulfilling adult life.

For a long time now, largely free current accounts for trainees and students as well as savings plans for starting your own pension have been important services offered by the savings banks. In order to communicate these services appropriately to a younger target group, many savings banks have opened special branches that are geared towards the particular interests and forms of communication of young people.

One example of this is “barer41” from Stadtsparkasse München. Not only does the name sound like a trendy bar, barer41 is also designed like a hip café. The location at Barer Straße 41 in Maxvorstadt offers students a contact point for financial advice and a casual meeting place with rooms for learning and working together, in addition to various events.

Similar concepts are pursued by many other institutions, including Berliner Sparkasse with its “Klub zur hohen Kante” location for young adults in the trendy Friedrichshain district and Stadt-Sparkasse Solingen with its S-Point am Hofgarten: here, young teams provide advice on all important financial topics in a relaxed atmosphere. There are various events on site, financial workshops or, as in Solingen, even the opportunity for entire school classes to come along with their teachers and book teaching modules on the subject of money and the economy.

In addition, digital touch points and online offerings are tailored to the interests and requirements of young people throughout the financial group and optimised on an ongoing basis. For example, the savings banks’ fund finder was recently made more user-friendly and provided with improved functions to make it easier for young investors in particular to enter the stock market and to make reliable information available.

Offers for young people relating to housing, leisure, finance and culture

Housing is also an important issue for most young people. But living space is scarce almost everywhere, and rents are correspondingly high. This is a big problem, especially for trainees and students, when many people want to move into their first home. This is why Hamburger Sparkasse built the “YUL YoungUrbanLiving by Haspa” (YUL) trainee flat block in 2024. It offers 70 units for 144 residents, an attractive location close to the city centre, affordable rents and was built to the highest ecological standards. The hall of residence is also an advertisement in its own right: some of the attractive places are reserved for Haspa trainees who come from outside the company. Haspa even covers half of the housing costs for the first year.

Sparkasse Fulda also offers start-up assistance for young people with housing costs. The savings bank has invested around 12 million euros in a new building near the local hospital. This is a joint project between Sparkasse Fulda, the City of Fulda, the Fulda Clinic and GWH Wohnungsgesellschaft Hessen. 56 affordable flats are being built for medical students and hospital staff. In the neighbouring district, savings bank Hersfeld-Rotenburg is initiating a construction project called “Wohnen am Campus”. A hall of residence with 120 flats for students of the Hessian University of Finance and Administration of Justice is currently being built here.

47%
of all KulturPass activations were carried out via the savings banks' online banking system (Q4 2024)

Making life easier – this guiding principle also applies to the savings banks in the cultural sector: this is why they have set up access to the KulturPass for young people in 2024. The KulturPass was an offer from the federal government that provided 18-year-olds with a “culture budget”. Anyone who came of age could use this pass to get EUR 100 for cultural events – whether for the cinema, concert or museum.

Originally, however, people interested in a Kulturpass had to register with their eID – the electronic identity card – in a complicated procedure. Thanks to the savings banks, this process became much easier in 2024: anyone with an account at a savings bank and the corresponding e-banking app was able to activate the cultural credit with just a few clicks.