Entrepreneur Henry White on building the “Net fl ix of finance”

BY GEORGIA HENEAGE

The global pandemic has sparked an increase in our cousins from over the pond relocating to London. Why? To access in-person schooling for their children. In the US, in both 2020 and to date in 2021, education provision has been in flux.

When UK schools were re-opening in September of 2020, US schools remained firmly closed, with most operating some form of online learning.

With the advent of Covid-19, it dawned on every parent and employer how much their livelihood and sanity depended on institutions placed too often in the background: the nation’s schools.

For individuals with flexible workplaces, deep pockets, or those able to open an arm of their existing US-based company in the UK, relocation to London for their offspring’s schooling was a no-brainer. For some families, this will be a short sojourn of a year or so, until their US schools are fully open again. Others will stay longer. As in the UK, US parents found it tough to juggle home-schooling with the demands of work and career. Families buckled under the strain that online learning had placed on the mental health of their children, and themselves, and a move to London schools was a welcome relief.

US families value London’s broad offering of schools and curricula. Although the American School in London (ASL) in St John’s Wood is the holy grail for many US families, lots are opting for British schools or English/ French bilingual schools. This is particularly true of families with younger children, who are less concerned about changing curriculum and whose children are not close to exam years. International schools offering the International Baccalaureate (IB) are sought-after, not least because the IB has become the go-to curriculum for students on the scholarship route to US universities. All US colleges, including Ivy League, value the IB’s emphasis on research and its multidisciplinary focus. Some US colleges are offering top IB students a fast-track option to skip a year of their course, a huge draw for parents hoping to save a year of prohibitive college fees.

As we have a shared language, it is often assumed that the UK and US education systems are similar. This is not the case. The UK has more nationally-assessed exams and the early years approaches are different. For children from aged four upwards, the US system is more playbased, whereas the mainstream UK system is focused on learning to read and write at a young age. To guard against culture shock, we recently placed the five-yearold daughter of a family relocating from Los Angeles in a Montessori school in Hampstead. The gentler Montessori approach was more aligned with her early years’ US education experience.

As I write, the expectation is that all US schools will be opened for the autumn of 2021. This current academic year has been inconsistent. Some schools opened, others operated a hybrid model (part in-person teaching, part online), some only offered remote learning. Generally speaking, the more “conversative” states, such as Texas, have been focused on maintaining, or even mandating, in-person instruction, whilst the more “progressive” states have offered hybrid options and made in-person learning optional. For example, on Long Island, most schools returned to some form of in-person instruction, but it was rarely mandatory and often hybrid with some online component.

A year later, the Covid-19 pandemic has changed education in America in lasting ways. Although most US families expect a return to the uniform, in-person teaching model for the coming academic year 2021/2022, some US school districts are developing permanent virtual options in the expectation that, post pandemic, families will plump for remote learning, even for their younger elementary/primary school offspring.

Relocation to London to access British schools has been the preserve of an elite, well-heeled tranche of US society. But we cannot ignore the reality that Covid-19 has been a tragedy for many students, especially those from disadvantaged backgrounds. Stories of kids who have melted away from education, dropped out of college, or gone hungry abound equally in the UK and US. We have been forced to question the efficacy and relevance of our existing education systems. The pandemic has unleashed a wave of accelerated change in education. This wave will continue to ripple out and to have a permanent and transformative effect on education systems in both the US and the UK.

When Henry White – now a fully-fledged FinTech founder – first entered the thorny world of money as an eager young intern in London, he found the industry to be like a 'black box': opaque and inaccessible.

Overcoming these barriers was for White a case of 'learning on the job'. White began working his way up the London finance ladder with no experience or training. Soon he was working as a successful hedge fund analyst, his job taking him from Greece to New York and Canada.

But this method of scaling the industry via trial-and-error seemed to be the privilege of a few, and his company Finance Unlocked – a digital educational platform for those in the finance world which completed its second fund raise in January at £1.75 million – was born out of a recognition that for many young people in finance, the tools available are few and far between.

The idea was conceived in part when co-founder Robert Ellison’s position on his firm’s learning and development committee opened his eyes to the limited scope of educational resources available. “We realised that either traditional incumbents were producing classroombased learning- which wasn’t scaleable and was expensive – or there were generic massive online course providers like LinkedIn Learning.”

Ellison and White identified a gap in educational resources that taught the fundamental skills of finance. “We felt like ultimately the whole learning experience was broken,” says White. “It became commonplace in the workplace that you would have bad training, and people strangely accepted it.”

During development, Ellison and White’s customer research revealed that people “wanted to be more knowledgeable” and wanted to be “the best possible versions of themselves”, but that “the tools didn’t match up with the demand”. Their research also surfaced a common theme: that people wanted an educational platform that could coincide with their leisure time. “That was a kind of ‘aha!’ moment for us”, says White.

“We wanted to build a brand that people could emotionally connect with and care about: we wanted it to be as beautiful and tactile as Netflix.” White says that digital content – particularly video – has grown in popularity during the pandemic. And because their audience demanded a premium product, they decided early on to create the content themselves, rather than outsource.

As well as attempting to “redefine learning for finance professionals”, Finance Unlocked aims to democratise the world of financial learning for young people. They opened up their platform free to universities during the pandemic: “The feedback was phenomenal”, says White. “96% of the student learners felt more confident applying for a career in finance having had access to this content, and it really improved their employability”. And what of the future of FinTech?

White says: “The FinTech industry is moving at a lightning pace. Its role as an enabler is obvious when it comes to making frictionless payments, exchanging currencies efficiently or democratising the investment space. But the impacts are much broader than that – and that broad impact now includes financial education.”