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Blackbullion Chooses Bud Financial to Power Customer Segmentation and Analysis Across Its Student User Base

London, United Kingdom
July 16, 2025

London, UK – July 16 2025Blackbullion, the leading student finance and financial wellbeing platform, has selected Bud Financial (Bud), a pioneer in financial data intelligence, to enhance its customer segmentation and data analysis capabilities through Bud’s powerful Drive solution. 

With a growing base of students leveraging Blackbullion's platform and app via Open Banking integrations, the company was sitting on a vast, enriched financial dataset, but faced challenges in turning that data into actionable insights. With such a vast range of demographic and socio-economic backgrounds in their customer base, the ability to segment based on niche characteristics was vital; but accessing these key analytics required support from data specialists, creating delays and operational inefficiencies.

By using Bud’s Drive solution, Blackbullion unlocks the ability for all team members to independently analyze customer behaviour, trends, and financial health across universities and regions – without needing input from a data analyst. This enables faster reporting, smarter marketing campaigns, and deeper insights for universities to properly allocate funding and serve their students based on real-time data.

“Blackbullion is doing vital work in helping students build a stronger financial future, and we’re proud to support that mission. By using Drive, their team can now access deep insights into student financial behaviour in seconds – without relying on analysts or complex tooling.” said Edward Maslaveckas, CEO at Bud. “It’s exactly the kind of outcome Drive was built for: giving organizations the power to understand and serve their customers better through enriched data.”

Key benefits include:

  • Quick and easy segmentation for tailored analysis and reporting
  • Personalized marketing campaigns based on accurate identification of eligible students
  • University-specific insights into student financial wellbeing
  • Natural language querying via Copilot, Bud’s built-in AI chatbot

“Technology and AI means that every element of a young person’s life is now hyper personalized – every element except their financial life. This is crazy to us,” said Vivi Friedgut, CEO at Blackbullion. “Working with Bud supports our #1 objective; to help those students that rely on us to get their money sorted in a way that reflects their own unique circumstances and ambitions.”

Blackbullion already uses Bud’s Assess and Engage products for their funds management feature and student PFM app, and are now adding Bud’s third flagship product to their stack. The partnership strengthens Blackbullion’s mission to improve student financial wellbeing by enabling universities to better understand and support their student populations – and helping students discover the financial products and services most relevant to them.

About Bud

Bud Financial (“Bud”) enriches financial data, identifying the likes of merchant, category, location and regularity of transactions, to provide actionable insights and readable inputs for LLMs in the financial services industry.

Scaling rapidly, Bud has been a trailblazer in its use of AI since 2015. The company has enabled banks and fintechs worldwide to get customer context from their transaction data so they can personalize the banking experience, proactively manage risk and optimize their business operations.

With tens of billions of transactions processed, Bud’s market-leading transactional enrichment, categorization and analysis helps financial institutions to become intelligent enterprises, fully harnessing their customer data and finding new, data-driven opportunities to grow. 

More at: thisisbud.com 

About Blackbullion

Blackbullion is the home of student money. Partnering with over 100 universities, colleges and companies Blackbullion supports 370,000 students (and counting!) to learn about money, access additional funding and manage their money well. 

Blackbullion is on a mission to help 1m students build a financially secure future.

More at: blackbullion.com