The Financial Services Millennials Need on Vacation

Rounding up this week’s series on travel, today we shift our focus onto the purchasing of financial products in the travel industry among Millennials; namely, travel insurance and foreign exchange services.

The importance of travel experiences among Millennials, together with their mobile-first mindsets, has led providers of these financial products to rethink how to best target and service these “always-on” consumers not just before but also during their holidays.

As we touched on in Thursday’s chart, financial technology services on mobile are allowing consumers to spend money abroad without needed local cash, and this isn’t restricted to China. Mobile-based challenger banks popular with Millennials in the West like Monzo have been offering consumers the best possible foreign exchange fees too. Our data shows that these new smartphone-based alternatives have a considerable market among Millennials, especially in Europe and North America where Millennial Vacationers are a lot more likely to be buying foreign exchange services compared to the average Vacationer in these regions.

Millennial Vacationers in these two regions are also ahead of the curve for purchasing or planning to purchase travel insurance too. This is another area where challenger banks are looking to stamp their mark, with Revolut now offering pay-per-day travel insurance which uses mobile geolocation technology to optimize the service.

The advantage of these smaller incumbents is in their ability to bring all of these travel services into one place within a familiar interface, tapping into the universal demand for convenience and on-demand functionality which is most pronounced among younger age groups. In any case, it’s clear that convincing these younger consumers to prepare for their travels means allowing them to interact with these services on-the-go, without obliging them to commit to large withdrawals or drawn-out insurance policies taken out in advance of their trips.

Millennial Foreign Vacationers are internet users aged 21-34 who travel abroad for vacation at least once a year.