Barclays Bank has helped UK children's charity the NSPCC to launch an app to provide counselling to young people in need of emotional support directly through their smartphone.
The idea for the Childline app, dubbed 'For Me', was dreamed up by four teenagers who wanted to put the full range of NSPCC online services directly into the hands of troubled kids.
Features include one-to-one counselling, ‘Ask Sam’ problem pages and entrance to a private ‘locker’ with a daily mood tracker where users can record their feelings.
Development of the service was performed on a pro bono basis by Barclays' coders.
Ashok Vaswani, CEO of Barclays UK, says: “The ‘For Me’ mobile app is a great new service that enables Childline to offer new capabilities reflecting that fact that young people now prefer use apps to have conversations rather than making a phone call. That is why we were so keen to lend our support using our own young apprentices to design and develop the new app.”