Public Funding for Mypocketskill Ltd

The Earn.Save.Lean project will provide an integrated Fintech and Edtech solution to support young people in becoming economically active and financially capable. We are a technology company, operating at the intersection of fintech and edtech, working to create a financially capable Gen Z. We have successfully launched our digital product in the UK, and it is being rolled-out UK-wide, with over 1,500 young people signing-up to the platform each month. Our project will further support our growth ambition through an 18-month project to: * Integrate digital skills training into the platform, using partner content, so that young people can become more proficient, productive and confident * Introduce an extension of financial functionality into our product. This will create a financial "ecosystem" of saving and investment products which young people can access. * Extend the range of financial education provided through the platform, building on our behavioural science "nudge" based approach. The impact of our approach is evidence-based, through ongoing involvement in UK Government-backed innovation pilots around building financial capability in children and young people. This competition builds on the Women in Innovation programme, where our cofounder Zara was named as an award winner in early 2021\. Since then, she has claimed several other awards, including: * Overall winner of a global female fintech competition, sponsored by Google, Atos and Deutsche Bank, with whom we are now actively working to grow nationally and internationally. * A participant in SVC2UK's Beyond HERizons programme, which connects UK women-led companies with US investors. We are also a part of other scale-up programmes, including Tech Nation's Fintech 4.0 Programme, in recognition of our place as one of the UK's most promising, rapidly growing Fintechs, and Innovate UK's Global Business Improvement Programme, taking the company to audiences in North America.

MyPocketSkill is an award-winning edtech/fintech company, which helps young people to earn, save and learn about money. This 3-month feasibility study will assist in our plans to enter the US market through a combination of market analysis, user/customer scoping and partner discussions. Our digital solution, which sits at the intersection of edtech/fintech, is already rolling out at scale across the UK, with over 1,000 sign-ups a month to our platform. We see the US market of particular interest since as a market for financial education, it dwarfs that of the UK. Moreover, we have a solution that is not yet available in the USA. We have a great team to deliver this, * Finalists in last year's Great British Entrepreneur Awards * Zara, cofounder, was named in TechInvest's Women in Finance Powerlist (Women Shaping the Future of Finance) * We are already participating in two other programmes which are focused on helping us to gain traction in the US/Can markets. This project will significantly enhance our chances of success in ensuring that our products are suitable and applicable for the US market and is scoping strategic partnerships to assist in the distribution, marketing and funding for our digital platform. This is also an impactful projects on many levels - MyPocketSkill was started with a clear ambition, to help create opportunities for young people to become employable and financially capable through advice and tools which combine the acquisition of knowledge with the practical realities of an "Earn. Save Learn" approach. Our overall vision is to "Create a Financially Empowered Gen Z" and we aim to scale to one million users within five years.

I am Zara Ransley. My background is in finance and investment and, more latterly, in youth employability related services too. I have led teams and helped organisations to build new digital products. I bring particular strengths in collaborative problem solving and the ability to lead diverse, often geographically distributed, teams. I thrive in and encourage a collaborative environment, enabling others to contribute, share ideas, encouraging diversity of thought and engagement in constructive debate and experimentation. MyPocketSkill is a fintech start-up, with the goal to help Gen Zs become more financially capable. MyPocketSkill has already achieved considerable success and I have won multiple awards both personally and also as part of the organisation, including being nominated in Innovate Finance's Women in Fintech powerlist. It puts me in a good position to promote diversity and be a role model for other women. Our project aims to develop an innovation which reconnects young people with earning and savings opportunities and supplements these online connections with prompts and nudges to develop and strengthen financial capability through a learning-by-doing approach. It builds on strong evidence that creating early money-earning opportunities helps to build capability, confidence and financial capability.

Young people have been hardest hit by the COVID pandemic, with huge disruption in education and now increasing unemployment in this demographic. The Young-Digital-Earners project will extend the functionality of our product to integrated financial savings and transactions. Specifically, we want to include functionality that will allow young people on the platform to progress from earning money to establishing earnings and savings goals and making choices around where their earnings are distributed. We are developing this capability through an established team which already has experience in designing and financial apps and has a close understanding of the economics and technology involved in this new application. By developing this functionality we will become a 1-stop-shop for young people to find opportunities to earn money and to then save/distribute their earnings. It will create a stronger relationship with our customers and open up opportunities for partnerships with banks / financial services providers. MyPocketSkill is an award-winning edtech/fintech company, recent successes include: * 2020 finalists in the Great British Entrepreneur Awards (Startup Category) * Zara, cofounder, was named earlier this year on TechInvest's Women in Finance Powerlist (Women Shaping the Future of Finance). * Featured in NatWest's 2019 \#PowerUp-100, a list of 100 startups, chosen from 10,000 who "stand out for having a significant impact on their local communities and on the national economy, showing impressive growth, and demonstrating the behaviours and qualities that we expect of the country's future business leaders". Our platform has also been useful and relevant throughout the COVID19 pandemic, with MyPocketSkill supporting work-at-home parents by connecting them with young people to provide education, engagement activities (academic, art, dance, digital, drama, music, technology help/tuition). These achievements were recognised recently through the EUvsVirus hackathon which was the world largest ever hackathon (20,900 participants and 2,150 projects) where we were a designated finalist.

This project will deliver an enhancement to our current platform to provide a digital community service, connecting parents/carers who are working from home with young people who can provide educational & engaging activities for children. Parents will be able to login to an online platform and book online sessions (art, dance, drama, music, technology, academic subjects) from capable young people. Our solution will onboard, verify and background check these young people and provide them with specific training and input to work safely and effectively. It will provide analytics and monitoring activities and provide a structured approach to booking and reviews. We have already tested this business model with students, parents and business owners, and used our existing platorm to pilot a prototype solution which we now want to build-out fully into a comprehensive and scalable offer. The project will have a significant beneficial impact on the lives of two target segments of the UK population: - Working parents/carers of young children who are currently working from home, but whose productivity is significantly impacted by the need to juggle work and childcare - Students (16-18) who were expecting to take GCSE and A-Level exams this summer but instead are unlikely to properly re-engage with the educational system for 3-4 months. Whilst the current crisis and lockdown has a particularly stark impact on these segments of the population, it is highly likely that current ways of coping will transition to mainstream once the emergency conditions have abated - this will take the form of more home/remote-working, greater acceptance of online forms of communication and service delivery and an increase in virtual rather than face-to-face communication. We are therefore projecting continued significant growth for this digital solution, once the lockdown ends. Further deliverables, provided through Extension for Impact funding with additionally include: - Commercial Exploitation to promote, market and scale-up the roll-out of our platform. - Consumer Workflow Optimisation, to refine UX/UI processes with our customers to deliver a set of streamlined user journeys from signup to booking, to reduce customer acquisition cost and signup abandonment - Internationalisation. To extend our trademarks to cover worldwide jurisdiction and to analyse platform content and functionality to identify changes required to adapt to a new country.

This project will apply human-centred design to explore the potential to grow and scale an online digital platform - a new way for teens to connect with local people for the purposes of earning money for doing simple jobs. The system connects users in a way no other social media platform does by having two types of profiles; buyer and seller and manages the interactions between the two safely and securely. We will apply an innovative approach to designing a digital platform, using human-centred design in the context of a digital platform to answer quesitons on how to connect teens safely and effectively to relevant tasks in their neighbourhoods, based on location, preferences and capabilities and what would attract more employers to the platform. We also want to user-test the feasibility of further unique innovations such as pairing of teen/parent profiles and being able to bid for live jobs on the platform. As well as growing the company profitably and creating opportunities for direct employment, the project will deliver value to the UK taxpayer by improving the skills and experience of young people - enhancing prospects for future employment, career decision-making, moving into higher education or setting up busienses of their own.