Eric Eastman, Co-Founder and CEO of Bobber Interactive

Many teenagers simply haven’t learned how to manage their money well. Bobber Interactive strives to fix this in an engaging, interactive way.

Bobber has “gamified” the not-so-fun task of saving money for a car, education, an Xbox, or whatever else a user wants to save up to buy. Through Facebook, users can manage their FDIC-insured account, set savings goals and request help and encouragement from friends and family.

CEO Eric Eastman is a veteran of both the financial and technology industries, working at J.P. Morgan until leaving in 1997 to start his own web company, JobJuice.com. Right now the platform is in beta, but a full launch will take place at the Finovate conference in New York around mid-September.

Tell me more about your technology... We’re a financial technology company, targeting Generation Y and engaging them in highly relative way with game-like mechanics. The game layer allows users to create saving for a specific goal. Games are good at tapping intrinsic human needs. Games give instantaneous positive feedback. It’s important to how people engage, and we have a lot of that feedback when someone’s saving up for an iPad.

Our platform is based on Facebook, but we built our platform to be expanded to other platforms like mobile. The user interface is built for social network, not just Facebook. Mobile is going to take off fast. It’s going to ramp in the next year or two, but in five years, the majority of smartphone users will be making transactions with those phones.

Why Facebook? About a year ago, Facebook rolled out Secure Socket Layers (SSL), which changes the potential around Facebook for utility apps. Fifty percent of time on Facebook is spent playing social apps, but Generation Y looks to their social network for validation to every decision they make, from what movie they see, etc. Facebook went out to 150 banks in Europe and found out that 90 percent would spend 2 to 10 percent of their marketing budgets on social networking integration in the next few years. We’re trying to get in the middle that with our brand.

How have you been able to get around the red tape of financial regulation? We partnered with Plastyc. They have a pre-paid debit card product. We have a lead generation partnership with them so we use our product to drive new cardholders for Plastyc. We plan on rolling out our own debit card in the future. Right now, three issuing banks are in discussion with us and two processors are in discussions as well.

Why focus on Generation Y?: Generation Y has $200 billion in discretionary income but wants to become more engaged in finance. They have come of age during the recession. The lesson has been to be careful of who you trust with your money. We bring more clear connectivity to financial life.

Only one-third of Generation Y has checking accounts. It’s surprisingly low. The sense of frugality is really strong in this market, and seeing what’s happening with financial institutions, there’s a much more cautious view on big banks. Pre-paid is trying to play into that a bit.

What have you done with your $1.1 million in funding? It allowed us to build the product. Most has gone into developer expenses and contractors. Later funding will be for marketing.

Are you hiring? We’re not hiring now, but looking to raise more money. A team of five could become eight, maybe 10. Developers are going to be our main focus. We’re very interested in people experienced on the front-end development, and also mobile experience.

What does the future look like? In true startup mode, no one really knows. I can see a pivot point early to mid next year, where we go more on the financial side (checking accounts, savings accounts, investments) or become more of a financial marketing company. One of the things we want to do is enable existing banks to drive acquisition and engagement. Once they’re there, if you can increase loyalty, that’s a big deal.