Sezzle Gives Its Gen Z Advisory Council Real Product Power

Sezzle, the Minneapolis-based buy now, pay later lender, has given thirty of its youngest customers a seat at the product table. The company spotlighted its Gen Z Advisory Council on October 19, a standing panel of users aged eighteen to twenty-five who meet with the product team every month to report what is working, what is confusing, and what should exist next in the app. The idea is simple: the generation most likely to use these products gets a direct hand in designing them.

The council works like a rolling focus group with real influence. Members gather for hour-long sessions with Sezzle's product marketing team, talk through their budgeting, spending, and saving habits, and test new features before they ship. According to the company's announcement, carried by Morningstar, the feedback already shows up in the app: council members pushed for the referral link to be easier to find inside the Shop tab and helped choose the design of the next virtual card. Those are small changes, but they are the kind that only come from watching actual users get lost in a menu.

The launch lands at a moment when young adults are rethinking money altogether. More than a third of Gen Zers have no emergency savings, according to Bankrate's 2026 Emergency Savings Report, and roughly one in five Gen Z respondents in a January survey from U.S. News & World Report said they never use a credit card. Put those two numbers together and the appeal of pay-in-installments plans becomes easy to see: they let shoppers spread out purchases without the revolving-balance machinery of traditional credit.

"Our mission is to financially empower the next generation, and we want to hear what that takes straight from the source," said Sarah Hill, the company's senior vice president of product, in a statement. She described a monthly loop in which council members report what is missing or confusing, and the product and design teams use that input to decide what to build and what to fix. The company presents the arrangement as listening; the test will be whether the features that emerge actually make young customers' finances healthier.

Why it matters for your wallet

Most financial products are designed for you, not by you, and the distance shows. Fees hide in menus, payoff timelines blur, and the people most affected by the design rarely get asked. A Gen Z Advisory Council flips that order, at least in part. If you use Sezzle, the next time an in-app flow feels clearer or a new card design looks sharper, there is a real chance a council member suggested it. That is a modest but meaningful shift in how fintech gets built.

The panel also functions as an early warning system. Council members are the first to say when a feature is confusing, and confusion in a lending product is where expensive mistakes happen. Sezzle says the group has already flagged pain points that led to concrete changes, a feedback loop that most banks handle through customer service tickets that disappear into a database. For young users managing tight budgets, that difference matters, and it connects to a broader trend GenZ NewZ has covered in workplace savings: financial products are slowly being rebuilt around how young adults actually behave, not how institutions assume they should.

There is a comparison worth making. Traditional credit cards charge interest that compounds, and one in five young adults avoids them entirely. Pay-later products like Sezzle's usually split a purchase into a short series of payments with no interest, which feels friendlier. The trade-off is that spreading payments across several apps and purchases makes it easy to lose track of what you owe in total. A council of young users is well placed to flag exactly that kind of drift, provided the company treats their feedback as design input and not just marketing.

The skeptical view

Not everyone will read this as good news. Critics of the pay-later model argue that making borrowing frictionless encourages spending, and a panel of young customers could be framed as research for better persuasion rather than better products. Sezzle's answer is that the council's fingerprints are already on user-facing fixes, like the clearer referral link, which is evidence of listening rather than selling. The truth probably sits in between: user input improves usability, and improved usability benefits both sides of the transaction.

The broader question is whether this becomes a pattern. If one lender finds that a Gen Z Advisory Council produces better products and louder advocates, competitors will copy it, and the next generation of financial apps may be co-designed by their youngest users. That would be a genuine change from an industry that has historically treated young customers as a risk category to be managed. Whether it leads to healthier finances or just slicker apps will show up in the data over the next few years.

For now, the practical takeaway is straightforward. If a financial app feels confusing, the company behind it may actually want to hear about it, and the fastest-growing ones are building channels to listen. Gen Z's money habits are already reshaping everything from side hustles to savings, as GenZ NewZ has reported on the rise of second incomes. This council is the next chapter: young users not just using the product, but writing its next version.