Australians have a reputation for straight talking – and Vivi Friedgut is no exception.
In Blackbullion, the founding CEO has built a business which works with around half of the UK’s universities to bring financial literacy and budgeting tools to hundreds of thousands of students.
Growth has been largely organic, with Friedgut only needing to raise around £4m funding over the seven years since she pivoted from delivering financial advice on campus to a technology platform.
However, having spotted a unique opportunity for the business early on, she admits that her board “raised their eyebrows”.
“I wanted to buy another company right in the middle of raising our seed round!” she tells BusinessCloud. “The US corporate scholarship market for students – where the likes of Coca Cola and McDonald’s pay students through their university education – is an $8bn-a-year market.
“In the UK, it was just a million pounds… a slight differential! There was one company that was listing these, so I decided to buy it.
“That was a really interesting experience. The deal was sub £100,000, just a small acquisition, but we were only raising £2m!
“I made the point that if they were ever going to trust me, this was the moment. I knew this was the right move, and to their credit, they backed me.
“Now we’ve got £25m worth of scholarships and bursaries in the country, and that part of the business is growing rapidly. We work with Amazon and Nationwide, infrastructure and engineering companies… so we are making scholarships a thing in this country.”
Sales equals success
Friedgut started out in sales before she was headhunted for roles in high-net-worth fundraising and wealth management. She says sales is “the best possible foundation a person can have to run a business”.
“There’s a story that does the rounds every few months: ‘first-time founders focus on product, and second-time founders focus on distribution’,” she expands.
“I don’t believe that’s true: rather, I think commercial founders focus on business, while product founders focus on products. If you’re commercially minded right off the bat, that’s the ultimate product-market fit.”
After a decade in private banking, she was made redundant. “I used my payout to start this business, expecting it to fail within six months – my plan then was to move back to Australia and go back into banking.
“I then failed at failing…. which was great! Blackbullion was born.”
Evolution
An EdTech in the early days – with Friedgut delivering financial advice to students on-campus – its name was derived from helping students to move from the red and into the black, with the ‘bullion’ representing the pure value of education.
“Education is the most important factor in terms of personal growth and development. That doesn’t necessarily mean degrees and formal education – rather constantly learning,” she explains.
“But when it comes to money, while education is crucial – you can’t go anywhere without it – the action piece is equally important: teaching people how to budget is great, but if they don’t then do it, the knowledge is pointless.
“It’s like learning how to swim: you have to learn [the mechanics] beforehand, but at some point you have to jump into the water and execute on it.”
It was this revelation that caused Friedgut to evolve the proposition towards a FinTech platform which today is unique in allowing students to learn about money, find money to fund their studies and manage their money in one place.
“We now have 92 topics of learning – everything from pensions and investments to crypto and how to network,” she says.
“We discovered that people were using that to more efficiently distribute funding to students – universities and colleges give out millions of pounds – using paper and pen.
“So we built out an efficiency tool – an end-to-end SaaS (software-as-a-service) product which included things like open banking and embedded payments. We then launched our app a number of months ago.”
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Scholarships
Blackbullion now houses the UK’s largest hub of support funds, scholarships and grants for students – to help them find and apply for additional funding they may be eligible for. To date, over £20 million has been awarded to students through the platform.
“We went from being an EdTech teaching people about money to a FinTech helping people to access additional funding, and now we’re really a data company… we have the largest lake of data, financial data and demographic data of young people in the country – fully anonymised – which we share with policy makers to allow them to support students [and promote social mobility].”
Blackbullion, which employs almost 30 staff, starred on our FinTech 50 ranking late last year. Judges were impressed by its drive to create a new market in the corporate scholarships space at a time when the cost of studying full-time has risen to an all-time high.
“The US is the beast whale of an education sector,” says Friedgut. “I mean, Coca Cola does millions of pounds’ worth of scholarships a year. We were like: ‘why can’t we do that in the UK?’ And some of these very enlightened, iconic brands really quickly got on board, because they’re desperate to secure talent.
“They’re desperate to get some of our fairy dust – doing good and achieving the ESG metrics they want.”
Friedgut says 325,000 students now use its system and that it is very UK-focused despite also having clients in Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and Ireland. In April it will run its third National Scholarships Week. The aim is to create a sector where £200m worth of scholarships and bursaries are awarded to students in the UK every year.
The entrepreneur adds: “We are a company that is very ‘blue ocean’… everything we have built is brand new. That has its pros and cons!”
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