Science Card has opened a new account via a Mastercard debit card to support a multitude of universities across the UK.
Through its free account, Science Card customers can choose which UK university projects they can support and automatically contribute each time they use the account.
When customers make a card payment, Science Card will automatically round 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.
Science Card Founder, Daniel Baeriswyl, 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.”
Projects customers can help support include research conducted by King’s College London, Newcastle University and others on kidney transplants, dementia and cervical cancer.
However, the UK has only used 2.7% of its GDP developing some of these research programmes. To put this into perspective, Germany, South Korea and the US spend 4.6% of its GDP on these initiatives.
Science Card found that as a result, the UK has an estimated £4bn funding gap which often leads university researchers to spend a disproportionate amount of their time sourcing funding rather than their research work.
Science Card’s goal is to overcome this by making it possible for researchers to crowdfund their work, not only creating a new way to overcome the sector’s funding gap, but also providing an opportunity to raise awareness amongst the public.
Professor Bashir M. Al-Hashimi CBE, VP of Research & Innovation at King’s College London, commented: “At King’s we’re training the next generation of scientists and creating a better, more sustainable future.
“The funding provided by Science Card and their customers will help to further strengthen this work and support important technological advances in areas including aerospace, medical imaging and environmental monitoring.”
