Monday, April 8, 2013

BofA inks financial education partnership with Khan Academy

Bank of America has joined the rapidly growing nonprofit online education site Khan Academy to launch a series of videos explaining personal finance topics.

The bank has launched a new site, BetterMoneyHabits.com, that maintains Khan Academy's trademark style to explain how to create a budget, how mortgages work, and the time value of money, among others. Users can also vote on what upcoming videos should be.

The Khan Academy has been around since 2009, with the mission of "a free world-class education for anyone anywhere." Its videos run the gamut from math to the humanities, but its financial offerings are particularly robust. Its founder, Sal Khan, was a hedge fund analyst before launching the academy in 2008.

The nonprofit brought in $1,500 in 2009, but has since boomed to $11.8 million in revenue in 2011, the most recent year for which data was available.

The Bank of America deal is not the first high-profile partnership Khan Academy has made. The nonprofit has also joined the LeBron James Family Foundation for a series of basketball-related videos on physics, math and science featuring the NBA star.

It is unclear if Bank of America is contributing money to the nonprofit. Khan says on an introductory video that Bank of America does not gain any editorial control over the personal finance videos, but says the academy will tap the expertise of the company's bankers.

"This is genuine," Khan says on the video. "Their mission is literally identical to ours."

1 comments:

Anonymous said...

Troubling to hear that Khan's mission is identical to BOA whose mission is to program ways to run up your service charges. I used to like Khan but associating with these unethical blood suckers and calling it a shared mission is repugnant and short sited on their part. Khan I thought was committed to news ways of learning not new ways of fleecing.