USjournal Revives its Funds Verification Initiative

Throughout USjournal's 20+ years, we've always been committed to advancing the global mobility of qualified students. The site evolved from a print publication in the early 1990s, into a family of 16 multi-lingual domains to promote an exclusive selection of US colleges, universities and English language programs. Now we focus on confronting specific complexities of International Enrollment Management, such as online and in-person recruitment events and funds verification.

Early on, we recognized that financial constraints often percolated as a primary impediment to studying in top host countries like the US, UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. It behooves all parties (prospective students, parents, campuses, sponsoring agencies, government authorities...) to acknowledge those constraints sooner rather than later, in order to explore practical alternatives that ultimately serve the students' best interests. By accessing applicants' financial data earlier in the admissions cycle, campuses and sponsors would gain deeper insight -- leading to better decisions about allocating their limited scholarship funds more effectively to meet their institutional missions.

Between 2006 and 2016, as internet banking burgeoned around the world, USjournal developed a sister service known as FundsV for "Funds Verification". The service improved both the efficiency and integrity of the process requiring applicants to prove financial capacity to cover their tuition and living expenses. In place of easily-manipulated, paper-based bank statements, FundsV empowered international students (and their financial sponsors) to point their online banking data to the authority who requested it.

In 2016, an education technology firm in London purchased FundsV -- though they never fully integrated the functionality into their global admissions platform. Terms of the acquisition mandated that FundsV Founder Cheryl Darrup-Boychuck work for the firm as US Director of Institutional Relations. Cheryl resigned from the company in June 2019.

In January 2020, the British platform fell into administration which essentially means the company went bankrupt, and was put under the management of Licensed Insolvency Practitioners. In July 2020, the authorities confirmed that Cheryl had been released from her non-compete agreement originally imposed by the now-collapsed company.

"I’m absolutely thrilled to be able to pursue funds verification again not only within international education, but across several industries including cross-border medical payments and real estate transactions," Cheryl explained. "We've decided to position this resurrected initiative as a business-to-business proposition, rather than interact directly with consumers. We're reaching out to trusted service providers already well-established within global enrollment management, to embed the FundsV functionality as part of their current suite of services."

"Thanks to our recent partnership with Qti.ai," Cheryl continued, "we're also considering the very latest trends in threat intelligence and cyber surveillance. That solid foundation fundamentally supports our development of procedures (namely APIs) for users to grant permission to access their sensitive financial data. Stay tuned!"

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Contact Cheryl to discuss FundsV's capabilities.

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