Banyan Education

What we do — Unlock capital. Multiply impact.

Wholesale Primary Funding

Scale through aggregation. Banyan operates as a specialised wholesale primary funder in alternative education finance. This includes responsible student debt financing as well as equity-based solutions through Income Sharing Agreements (ISAs). Banyan partners with proven and responsible providers to deliver diversification across providers, geographies, sectors, and vintage years.

For investors, this means access to relationships, expertise, and markets where direct investment would be impractical.

For the ecosystem, it means strengthened infrastructure through standardised metrics, shared best practices, and the capital concentration necessary to build a credible asset class.

Secondary investments

The impact multiplier. Our secondary investments purchase payment streams from employed, repaying graduates to deliver returns in an abbreviated time-frame, and manage the risks of non-graduation, non-compliance, and unemployment by focusing on proven outcomes.

For student finance providers, this creates immediate liquidity to educate more students today – effectively multiplying every dollar of deployed capital – and is building the market infrastructure and liquidity to attract institutional capital to the sector.

Direct investments

Patient capital for transformative growth. While secondary investments drive immediate capital efficiency, direct investments in proven, high performance providers enable the growth, geographic expansion, and structural innovations that create tomorrow’s opportunities.

These longer-duration commitments support established providers to enter new markets, and emerging organisations to create new education-to-employment pathways. Direct investments provide portfolio balance while funding the growth that makes secondary markets possible.

Transparency

Performance and impact in real time. We value transparency and accountability, and are building technology to provide continuous visibility into both financial performance and social outcomes. Investors will soon be able to access live portfolio dashboards including allocations and repayment performance, alongside impact and demographic metrics.

Blended finance

Orchestrating capital for enduring transformation. In order to reach as many highly driven students regardless of location, circumstances and income level, we employ a blended finance approach which brings together philanthropic, concessional, and commercial capital in structures designed for maximum collective impact. Together we can explore the limits of possibility and scale proven models, while extending educational access to students in fragile contexts or underserved communities.

Banyan Foundation

Reaching beyond market solutions. The Banyan Foundation exists to deploy grant capital and concessional financing in contexts where commercial returns are least likely but transformation potential is extraordinary. What the Foundation proves viable, we scale commercially.

When we began the microfinance movement, the world thought the poor needed charity. But what they really needed was a chance — a way to unlock their God-given potential.

The Banyan model carries that same spirit into the realm of education: creating pathways for young people to invest in their future with dignity and hope. It’s an approach grounded in principles that have stood the test of time.

—David Bussau, Founder, Opportunity International Australia