Case studies

How Blackbullion uses open banking to speed up student funding and support financial education

01 November 2024

Every autumn, many university and higher education students are faced with the task of managing their own finances for the first time – tuition fees, accommodation costs and essential course materials all have to be factored into their personal budget. This can be quite a daunting task, particularly for students who don’t have any previous experience of handling money.

With the Student Loans Company estimating that the average student debt in the UK is expected to be £42,900 for those starting in the system during 2023-24, the importance of understanding basic finances – money coming in, versus money going out – can’t be underestimated. 

This is where financial education platform Blackbullion can help. The company, founded in 2014 by CEO Vivi Friedgut, has financial literacy and inclusion at its core, and aims to help students in higher education to ‘get smart with money’ and better understand their finances, both at university, and as a key life skill for their future.

Blackbullion’s money management app was one of the first built exclusively for students, and offers complete visibility of all a student’s finances in one place. The app enables them to set their own budget and create customised spending categories, based on spending insights informed by open banking connections. It also suggests areas where they can save.

Students can earn rewards for sticking to their budget with the ‘bullions currency’, which can be exchanged for prizes.

Hub of student funds

As well as offering its own custom-built money management app and educational tools, Blackbullion has built the UK’s largest hub of student support funds, bursaries, scholarships and hardship grants [it is an authorised government provider] and enables eligible students to apply directly for additional financial support via its Funds Management System [FMS].

Both the app and the FMS use an open banking solution, provided by data intelligence company Bud, to analyse bank data in near real-time, and simplify and speed up the application process.

Historically, students needed to manually download, submit and annotate a series of bank statements to prove their eligibility for funding. Not only was this a time-consuming process, sometimes involving a physical visit to their bank, it also slowed down access to much-needed funds.

Bud’s Assess solution gives students the option to consent to connect their bank account to their application so this evidence can be automatically applied. This means they can now provide proof of their financial incomings and outgoings in just a few minutes, as opposed to several days, and get a decision, and funding, more quickly.

The solution uses the same secure technology as high street banks, and third party open banking providers such as Bud, are regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority.

The hub makes funds available from both educational institutions – many universities offer their own hardship schemes – as well as third party providers. Blackbullion partners with more than 60 universities and colleges across the UK, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa and, to date, has facilitated the distribution of more than £17 million in funds to students.

Efficiencies for universities

As well as speeding up access to funds for students, the FMS also offers participating universities and educational institutions time and cost efficiencies. For example, having direct access to students’ latest bank data eliminates the risk of incorrect bank statement periods, inaccurate account numbers, or missing annotations.

Blackbullion estimates that using the FMS makes it two to four times faster for staff to process and allocate fund applications, and results in a 25% reduction in finance and administration costs for this task.

Abi Keay, Financial Support Manager at Keele University, commented: “Open banking has been a game changer for our Hardship Fund processing at Keele, and has improved our own experience of processing applications as well as students’ experiences of applying.

“At first, I was unsure whether students would be too cautious about it, but we’ve seen very few students this year opt to provide bank statements manually. The vast majority have chosen open banking to support their Hardship Fund applications and it’s not hard to understand why.”  

Financial resilience

The financial data that Blackbullion aggregates (£420 million of spend history, £415 million of income history, across 15 million transactions) enables the firm to build a deep understanding of students’ financial behaviour, and to continue to develop relevant resources to further their financial education.

Its Financial Wellbeing Score combines transaction history, financial education, and financial resilience to produce an assessment of a student’s financial health, building a profile of their individual ‘money personality’ and ‘nudging’ them to targeted articles on its learning platform.

Developing corporate scholarships

Blackbullion also founded the UK’s National Scholarships Week, supported by higher education regulator the Office for Students, and in April 2024 facilitated the distribution of £800,000 worth of funding, covering 75 scholarships from organisations such as the Chaucer Group, Stack Infrastructure, FTI Consulting and engineering company Accu.

Vivi summarises the financial platform’s success.

More than 300,000 students have engaged with the Blackbullion universe, whether it’s learning key money skills like crypto, investing and credit scoring, searching for additional funding from major companies (we have over £25m worth of scholarships available from Amazon, Nationwide and others), managing their money on the app, or developing a better financial wellbeing score using our brand new tool.”

All of this combines to help equip students for a secure financial future.