This week’s startups to watch take on financial aid for education and optimized hardware for bank operations.

1. Principly – Principly sims to bring modern sensibilities to the traditional concept of a college fund. Its stated mission is “to make college a reality for more kids by empowering families to save smarter and raise funds from previously untapped sources.” A growing population and dangerous unemployment rate combine to create a climate in which more young people need a college degree to get a job, so Principly is stepping in to fill a pressing need.
2. EdAid – In the same vein as Principly, EdAid helps people pay for college. What’s different about this UK-based startup is that it is a crowdfunding marketplace that enables students to fund higher education from the community, interest free. EdAid claims to save the average student over $50,000 in interest charges and 10 years of indebtedness. If that’s true, EdAid will be a huge boon for a generation or more of university students in the U.K.
3. Wayerz – Wayerz’s platform focuses on improvement of productivity and automation of bank-to-bank systems, transactions and interfaces; increasing the real-time control and transparency of the relationships between financial institutions.By tracking global wiring schedules and statistics in real time, Wayerz’s technology enables banks and their corporate clients to choose the optimum route for every wire – based on wiring cost, wiring time, restrictions, and other considerations. With the advent of mobile banking, customers expect their transactions to happen faster then ever. Wayerz facilitates this, and could see considerable success worldwide.