Australia’s first student marketplace app, QPay, wants to become a genuine challenger bank for millennials.

QPay was started in 2015 by former ANU students Andrew Clapham and Zakaria Bouguettaya as a payments app for uni students that helped them buy merchandise, event tickets, club memberships, gowns and textbooks.

Less than three years later, QPay has almost 40% of ANU students signed up, and one in eight uni students across Australia.

It has now enabled more than $11 million in transactions for those 150,000 users, and pulled just under $1 million in capital from the likes of American Express and Sydney Angels.

Now, it has a MasterCard:

QPay also has a presence in the US and UK, at the University of Oxford and Cambridge.

The student-designed QPay MasterCard debit card will initially be rolled out to 2000 users, with more than 4300 signed up on a wait list.

“University is the time when life decisions start to become quite future-focused, especially regarding our finances,” Clapham said.

“We might be weighing up the amount of student debt we can responsibly accrue, and what return we might expect to receive career-wise or saving for a deposit on a property and wondering the best place to deposit our cash.”

Clapham says the thousands of student transactions occurring on the app each month has allowed the team to develop a financial product that “perfectly suits the financial behaviour of the student market”.

“Students are always looking for affordability and convenience,” he said. “The best deal for the least amount of effort.

“Given that universities arguably comprise the largest cluster of millennials anywhere in Australia, we see this as our first step towards becoming the next challenger bank for millennials.”

QPay’s investors include the head of Royal Bank of Scotland’s Australian arm, Andrew Chick, world-renowned leadership consultant, Charles Carnegie, and prominent angel investor, Rayn Ong.

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