Manuel Avello, co-founder of Bcas: “The support of the CDTI Innovation and the FEDER funds has promoted an alternative scoring that encourages the financial inclusion of students”

Bcas was born in 2021 with a mission as specific as it is ambitious: to eliminate the economic barriers that prevent thousands of students from accessing quality post-compulsory education. His vision, explains Manuel Avello, co-founder of the company, stems from a simple but forceful observation: “In Spain, post-compulsory education is not free and many talented young people are left out because they cannot afford a course in advance. We saw that tech bootcamps had very high employability, but students could not fund them and banks did not offer any solution for profiles with no credit history.”

From that premise, Bcas set out to build a financial services platform specifically designed for education. The Income Sharing Agreement (ISA) allows students to train without paying anything in advance, returning only if they find employment and exceed a minimum wage threshold. “It’s a model that fully aligns the incentives: if the student doesn’t thrive, neither do we. And if you do well, you pay proportionally to your real income. It is financing linked to professional success, not traditional credit risk,” explains Avello.

With 25 employees – eight of them dedicated exclusively to R&D – the company operates under a B2B2C model: its direct customers are the schools, which channel and refer students who need funding. In Spain they collaborate with leading educational institutions in technical training, including the International Postgraduate School, Evolve or Ironhack. In Germany, its main partner is Tomorrow University, an institution focused on technology, innovation and sustainability. International expansion is still incipient, but the aim is to consolidate the model in the EU. “Our presence outside Spain is in the initial phase but Germany is growing very well and we are exploring Portugal and France,” he says.

Over the years, Bcas has developed two differential technology capabilities: an alternative scoring system (Kosmos) that predicts future employability rather than past solvency, and a real-income recovery system that is activated only when the student exceeds a minimum wage. This applied innovation approach has led the company to launch KOSMOS 2.0, a project supported by the CDTI Innovation and co-financed with European ERDF funds, aimed at deepening the construction of a predictive evaluation engine for students without financial history. This institutional support has been key to “incorporate specialized resources, train models with more and better data and integrate new variables that have increased the accuracy of the system.”

Assessing the potential, not the financial past

The KOSMOS 2.0 project responds to a very specific need: to develop a reliable method for evaluating students who do not have a credit history but do have real potential for future employability. According to Avello, this is one of the big gaps in the current financial system. “Traditional banking cannot evaluate these profiles because it is based on the past: credit history, job stability, debt levels, etc. None of these variables exist for a young person who is starting his professional career. And that effectively excludes thousands of talented people.”

For Bcas, the key is not to analyze past solvency, but future employability. For this reason, KOSMOS 2.0 seeks to overcome three structural barriers: the lack of access to funding due to the lack of financial data, the injustice derived from classic criteria that penalize young people without a career path and the dependence on slow, manual and subjective processes that hinder an accurate and scalable evaluation.

The system combines educational, work and soft skills (soft skills) variables with information on the employability of the training sector. The goal is to build a holistic model capable of predicting who is highly likely to find employment after an intensive course or technical program. “The difference is that our scoring wonders what a student can become, not what it has been until today. We measure potential, not past,” summarizes the co-founder.

This innovative orientation—evaluating potential rather than previous solvency—is precisely the kind of technological challenge that, according to Avello, could not have been addressed with internal resources without the support of the CDTI and ERDF funds. “Without this help, we would have taken twice as long and the project would have had less technical depth,” he says.

Software by Bcas

Advanced technology for alternative scoring

KOSMOS 2.0 involves testing advanced analysis and prediction technologies. The project uses machine learning models trained and managed with AWS SageMaker, with regularization and validation techniques aimed at increasing the accuracy of the system. It also develops complex transformations on structured data from working life, educational levels and soft skills forms, in order to generate predictive variables that banks do not contemplate.

Dynamic decision-making workflows are another pillar, enabling real-time evaluation criteria to be adjusted according to the type of funding product, the specific training or the country. “We want a living system that learns and is optimized on its own. That it can adapt to each market or school without having to redo the entire model”, explains Avello.

In addition, the project includes the validation of integrations with external sources, such as credit bureaus when they apply, to enrich the model and avoid false positives. In other countries, such integration will depend on the available infrastructure. “Each market has different systems and one of our biggest challenges is to adapt the model to those differences without losing technical consistency,” he adds.

This leap in technical complexity – which requires more data, more experimentation and greater sophistication of models – has been possible, in the words of Avello, because European funding reduces barriers to entry to create its own technology, especially in sectors where innovation is essential. “As a result, solutions such as our alternative scoring reach the market earlier and benefit groups that would otherwise be excluded.”

The challenge of predicting employability

The main challenge of the project is, paradoxically, the essence that motivates it: predicting future employability with partial, heterogeneous and often incomplete information. Most students have short or non-existent career paths, and come from very diverse backgrounds. “It’s hard to build a robust model when traditional financial sector data simply doesn’t exist. That’s why we need alternative variables and an infrastructure that allows us to evaluate them correctly,” says Avello.

The differences between countries add complexity: the availability of data, regulatory frameworks and official systems are not homogeneous. However, the company has chosen to design a modular system, capable of integrating with different sources or operating with alternative approaches when official data is not available.

A differential solution against competitors

The differential feature of the Bcas scoring system is its focus on financial inclusion based on employability potential. Compared to traditional models, which consider only credit variables, the company’s approach evaluates the student from an integral perspective. “Our scoring is aligned with the student’s success. We only charge if you find a job and exceed the salary threshold of 1,416 euros per month. That forces us to be very precise, because if we are wrong, we do not enter anything.”

This approach contrasts with what international competitors offer in consumer credit. According to Avello, “none is really oriented to the student’s potential. Either they apply strictly financial criteria, or they assess risks very superficially. We go into the detail: what it studies, what demand that sector has, what experience it has, what skills it shows and what real probability it has of working later”.

Bcas Work Team

Trade strategy and international expansion

The growth of Bcas is supported by a scalable system based on training centers as the main channel. After signing an agreement with a school, it is routinely diverted to students in need of funding, allowing for organic growth at low commercial cost. “Each center is a node. When you start working with us, it becomes a stable flow of students. It’s a model that scales very well,” says Avello.

The expansion strategy focuses on Spain and Europe, with special emphasis on sectors with high employability: technology, cybersecurity, industrial VET or renewable energies. Although Latin America is a market with potential, the current roadmap prioritizes European countries where there are guarantees from the European Investment Fund, as is already the case in Germany. “We do not want to enter markets for which we are not yet operationally prepared. Europe is where we can replicate our model more safely,” he says.

Social and economic impact

The expectations of impact for the next five years are clear. In the social sphere, the company estimates that thousands of students will be able to access quality education thanks to the alternative scoring developed in this project. “This helps reduce the inequality of truth. Access to training will no longer depend on family income and will depend on talent and effort,” says Avello.

Economically, Bcas aspires to become Europe’s leading education funder. The improvement in the accuracy of scoring will be vital to expand the number of centers, reduce risk and enter verticals such as Vocational Training and regulated education. “If we analyze future employability well, we can fund more students at lower risk. That’s the basis for scaling sustainably,” he says.

And at this point, Avello underlines the structural dimension of public support: “Thanks to this help we can fund students that the banks would not serve. This has real effects on social mobility, future productivity and the country’s competitiveness.”

CDTI Innovation

The Center for Technological Development and Innovation, CDTI E.P.E. It is the innovation agency of the Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities, whose objective is the promotion of technological innovation in the business environment. The mission of the CDTI is to ensure that the Spanish business fabric generates and transforms scientific and technical knowledge into globally competitive, sustainable and inclusive growth. In 2024, within the framework of a new strategic plan, the CDTI provided more than 2.3 billion euros of support to Spanish companies and startups.

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