Financial Education Needs a Reboot: Founder Vivi Friedgut Has a Plan

Blackbullion’s Vivi Friedgut wants to do for money what Sex and the City did for sex—break the taboo and get people talking.

by Dianne See Morrison for Oslo Business Region

For nearly a decade, Vivi Friedgut, founder and CEO of Blackbullion, a Hackney, London-based edtech startup, has been on a mission to teach university students how to manage their money. But Friedgut, an economist by training and a former wealth manager by profession, isn’t here to exhort students to cut out their latte habit or round up purchases to save the difference. Instead, she wants them to think about money the way her former wealthy clients did—strategically and on a much bigger scale.

“One of the things you see when working with wealthy people is the difference in how they view money and its power,” says Friedgut. “They tend to see it as an opportunity to make more money and create the impact they want. Wealthy people are a lot less afraid of debt, but they also view it as a tool to build assets. People with less money tend to see debt as a way to buy things, like a holiday.”

She was also struck by how much emphasis her wealth management clients placed on financial education within their families. “They made sure their kids were comfortable with what money is and how best to use it,” she says. “I kept thinking—how can we bring this kind of financial education to the masses? I wanted to demystify money and make it okay to talk about. It’s such a taboo subject, yet it rules our lives. I want to do for money what Sex and the City did for sex.”

Bringing Financial Education Online: “Netflix Meets Sesame Street Meets Wall Street”

In 2012, the question of how to bring wealth management thinking to young people, and especially university students, became even more urgent as news broke that the outstanding U.S. student loan balance had surpassed $1 trillion, while in Britain, university fees were set to triple that academic year. It became clear that many students taking on debt to finance their education didn’t fully understand how loans worked—how they were funded, repaid, or even the impact their debt would have as they embarked on their lives

And, years later, the problem persists. In the U.S., the college testing organization ACT recently found that 70% of students were unaware that the government subsidized student loans. In the UK, student accommodation provider Unite Group found that two-fifths of students did not understand how student financing worked.

To tackle the issue, Friedgut initially launched face-to-face financial workshops in 2013 but quickly realized she could have a far greater impact and reach by taking her classes online. To make it sustainable, she also needed to provide universities with a reason to buy the platform. The answer? A tool that would both manage the financial aid application process and provide students with financial education. She approached university clients and asked: If I build this, will you pay for it?

“Three of them said yes and paid upfront,” Friedgut recalls. That September, Blackbullion’s digital platform launched.

Today, universities license Blackbullion to manage funding applications and provide students with access to a library of financial education modules covering everything from budgeting basics to the workings of the global economy. The content is broken into gamified modules with a mix of text, video, and quizzes—or, as Friedgut describes it, “Netflix meets Sesame Street meets Wall Street.” Some universities even require students applying for financial assistance to complete modules to ensure they understand what they’re signing up for.

Despite an anxious few weeks at the start of the UK’s lockdown, the pandemic has been a “net positive” for the company, according to Friedgut. The initial fear that universities would pull back on spending proved unfounded. Recently, Blackbullion signed on Imperial College London, bringing its university count to 43 institutions across the UK, Australia, and New Zealand, now reaching some 700,000 students. King’s College London, meanwhile, renewed its contract for the fifth year in a row.

Revenues from university licenses have allowed Blackbullion to bootstrap itself, raising just £1 million in total funding, including a £400,000 seed round in 2019.

Lifelong Financial Learning

For Friedgut, students are just the start. While the global student debt crisis remains an entrenched issue,  Covid-19 has also laid bare the problematic relationship that many consumers - not just young people - have with money and just how many have taken a fingers-crossed approach to personal finances.

“There are middle-income and high-income people who are in financial distress because they don’t have an emergency fund, because they didn’t save,” says Friedgut. “It’s not just young people who are sticking their heads in the sand about money.”

Looking ahead, she envisions a future where every financial product comes with an educational component to help consumers understand what they’re buying and its long-term impact. For Friedgut, it’s not just about helping students budget—it’s about changing the way people think about money altogether—grander, but also savvier. With financial missteps costing consumers and institutions billions, the stakes are high. Pointing to Barclays’ recent £26 million fine for mistreating customers who had fallen behind on loan payments, she makes her stance clear: “Financial education is not just a charity issue, but a cold hard strategic one.”