Originally written by Small Business Team on Small Business
Thousands of foreign students and migrant workers are deterred from coming to Britain because of the difficulty of obtaining a UK bank account. Often you need a UK bank account to rent somewhere to live or have your earnings paid into it, yet the rigmarole involved in setting up with a high street bank is off-putting.
Matt Oldham, CEO of Unizest, has created an e-account for overseas workers and students coming to Britain. It solves a huge problem for recruiters of the 1.5m contingent workers who come to the UK each year.
Although it hasn’t even launched yet, the Unizest team have been handpicked as one of eight winners in the latest round of The Start-Up Series Competition, sharing £1.1m between them.
Where did the idea for Unizest come from? What is the problem that it’s solving?
The idea came from some work that Tony Shawcross, one of our co-founders, and I were doing with one of our clients at the time, a large CRM organisation working in the recruitment space. They framed the challenge they had getting non-UK workers seamlessly into Britain. The problem they encountered was that it was very difficult for those workers