Improving efficiency and integrity in global operations

USjournal facilitates worldwide mobility by streamlining processes to get people and money from Point A to Point B. We're currently solving for the global challenge of verifying available funds across multiple sources, institutions, regions and countries in real time -- so authorities, businesses, consumers and other stakeholders can proceed with confidence during the due diligence phase of the transaction.

How did we get here?

The business evolved from a glossy international student recruitment magazine (the US Education Journal), to an online family of 16 multi-lingual domains (the US Journal of Academics) to promote an exclusive selection of US colleges, universities and English language programs. After 20+ years of generating initial student inquiries, we pivoted toward addressing operational inefficiencies in the international admissions process (the US Journal for International Enrollment Management).

Our latest iteration (2021) is simply USjournal. That deliberately vague name liberates us to explore opportunities beyond international education, and delve into verticals such as global real estate, health care, travel and other high-end cross-border transactions.

Over the past 25 years, our What’s next? mentality led us to launch several cross-disciplinary projects:

• We developed a Funds Verification service to improve the efficiency and integrity of host governments' requirement for student applicants to prove sufficient funds as a condition of their visa application.
• Our Fair Schedule has become an industry-leading resource, consistently listing hundreds of in-person and virtual events that promote US education around the world.
• We co-created a complimentary online tool for international educators to measure Return on Investment for their recruitment efforts.

Of all of our innovations, the Funds Verification functionality has proven the most enduring and resistant to market fluctuations. Early in USjournal's history, 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. 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 to minimize associated risks. 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 USjournal's capabilities.

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