UK fintech Science Card has opened an e-money account to further its goal of supporting scientific projects across health, climate change and tech through customer spending.
Through its free account, Science Card customers can choose which UK university project(s) they’d like to support and automatically contribute to these projects each time they use their Mastercard Science Card.
When customers make a card payment, Science Card automatically rounds up the amount and use it to fund research on the customer’s chosen themes or projects. Round-ups can be multiplied from 1x to 10x and customers can vary the projects they round up into.
As a socially-conscious company, Science Card also contributes 10% of its profits directly to its sourced research projects
Current research people can choose to support includes projects focusing on kidney transplants, dementia and cervical cancer, being conducted at King’s College London, University College London, Newcastle University and Kingston University.
Science Card successfully closed its pre-seed round in February 2023, and became available to UK customers in Spring 2024. The Science Card account is provided and the card is issued by Transact Payments Limited, a licensed Electronic Money Institution (EMI), authorised and regulated by the Gibraltar Financial Services Commission. Through the app-based account, users can organise their finances through spending pots and send and receive money.
Founder of Science Card, Daniel Baeriswyl, PhD, said: “The UK is a world leader when it comes to research and development, with huge potential to advance the areas of health, technology and combating climate change. But for too many people in these fields, their time is spent securing increasingly hard-won funding, taking them away from what matters most and creating the risk that vital research might not even be able to take place.
“At Science Card we want to overcome this. Our mission is to bridge the gap between science and financial services, empowering people to shape our sustainable future, and enabling them to drive game-changing breakthroughs and innovations in science and tech, all by just going about their everyday spending.”