From roundups to results: How Science Card accelerates scientific breakthroughs

While earning his Ph.D. in biomedical engineering, Daniel Baeriswyl realized scientists waste a lot of time chasing research funding, and he suspected that many had better things to do in their labs — like the actual work of, say, making the planet a better place to live or helping people live longer and healthier lives.

“I want to bring money closer to science so everyday people can fund life-changing innovations in areas that matter most to society: curing cancer, green energy, cleaning plastic, pollution — everything,” Baeriswyl says.

He and his partners created Science Card, a financial platform that gives individuals in the United Kingdom the ability to fund specific scientific research projects as they spend. Customers can open e-money accounts or use their Mastercard debit cards to join Science Card to contribute to the projects they want to support — for starters, in the fields of climate change, health care and computational power.

Science Card is making a big difference for scientists like James Millen, director of King’s Quantum research center at King’s College London, who will receive funding to help develop sensors based on levitating microparticles, with applications in medical imaging, environmental monitoring and aerospace, among others. The U.K. spends only around 2.7% of gross domestic product on research, about half the percentage spent in countries like Germany, South Korea and the U.S. As a result, the country has an estimated £4 billion funding gap for scientific research. Millen says this is particularly noticeable when it comes to translating basic science into a viable new product or technology.

“This funding gap stifles innovation, so Science Card offers vital support to researchers,” he says. “Science Card will support me in finding use cases and investment for the technology emerging from my research.”

From opportunities to battle hunger by rounding up at the grocery store checkout to  large-scale consumer campaigns like Mastercard’s Priceless Planet Coalition, which aims to restore 100 million trees, digitalization is making it easier than ever to link payments to people’s passions. “Partnerships like these can help people turn spare change into real change and make significant investments into breakthrough innovations,” says Mastercard’s Simon Forbes, president of U.K. and Ireland.

Science Card customers can pick from among the available projects, which are set up in a dashboard with videos and other material explaining the research. One of its key benefits is that it allows people to directly fund research they care about, even if they only have a few cents at a time to give. Customers can opt to automatically contribute by rounding up the amount they spend on their Mastercard debit card, give a set amount monthly or make a one-time payment. Roundups can be multiplied up to 10 times to make even more of an impact.

In general, participants have been rounding up their spend, although several have used their accounts to make significant one-time contributions as well. Customers can then follow their funded research projects’ progress through the app.

The Science Card team makes use of an external panel of experts from around the globe to vet projects. Today, most projects focus on health care research, including kidney transplants, dementia and cervical cancer, but Baeriswyl plans to add several more that would investigate clean energy and other technological advances to fight climate change.

Baeriswyl reached out to Mastercard earlier this year, hoping to raise awareness of both the cutting-edge research taking place at U.K. universities and the unique ways in which the public can help fund projects that align with their interests.

Consumers have been enthusiastic about driving research projects close to their hearts. Research in the U.K. is largely funded by the public, yet citizens have very little direct stake in this research or even awareness that it is taking place. “The opportunity for the public to have a voice in research is exciting,” Millen says, “and I believe will increase engagement between citizens and the scientists doing research on their behalf.”

Science Card, which launched in August, should make its first disbursements to researchers later this year. Although it is limited to the U.K., Baeriswyl is working to expand to other countries, including Europe and the Middle East, as well as the U.S.

“People immediately get that this is an easy way to accelerate scientific discovery so it can find faster cures and greener energy,” Baeriswyl says. “We especially get very positive responses from families, from people seeing that using Science Card promises a better future for children and younger people. They have a lot of motivation to make the world a better planet.”