Edubao

A student visa for Germany has a hard financial gate. The applicant must open a blocked account, a Sperrkonto, and park a year of living costs in it before the visa is granted. That amount is set by the German authorities and rises every year. It reached 11,904 euros for 2025-26, close to 11 lakh rupees.

The demand behind that gate is large and growing. India is now the single largest source of international students in Germany, around 59,000 in winter 2024-25, up about 20% in a year. Germany has pulled ahead of the United States and Canada in Indian study abroad applications. Yet opening a blocked account from India meant German-language forms, foreign banking rules, and a process most applicants had never seen.

Edubao set out to remove that friction. It needed a digital platform that could open a compliant blocked account online, in English, and guide the applicant through counselling at the same time, with both sitting in one record rather than two disconnected systems.

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Appetals built the platform that runs both jobs in a single student record. The blocked-account workflow handled the deposit mechanism required for the German visa, from sign-up through funding to the documentation the embassy needs. The digital counselling layer guided the applicant from first enquiry through application, against the same profile.

The design choice that mattered was joining the two. A student's counselling context and their blocked-account status lived together, so the applicant never re-entered the same information and Edubao's team saw the whole picture on one screen.

Technical scope: blocked-account workflow integration, a digital counselling platform, and a single student-record lifecycle that connected the regulatory process to the advisory one.

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