Announced on February 20, the initiative sports a Unibuddy add-on onto GMAC’s website where students can chat with ambassadors from their business school of choice, and ask them about their university experience or for tips on preparing for the GMAT.

The Unibuddy collaboration will also make it possible to explore other aspects aiding the decision-making process such as the local area, or further details on the program.

“We were always looking into ways to better support that group of students and GMAC is reaching students at a really important part of the journey through their webpages,” said Jack Craig, partnerships account director at Unibuddy,

Craig also added he’d previously worked with Nalisha Patel, regional director for Europe at GMAC.

Patel emphasised that this venture is a pilot for the European region and will primarily focus on Europe-based candidates, saying that Unibuddy was a perfect match as a lot of the business schools within the region “are Unibuddy partners”.

Patel confirmed that GMAC would be open to exploring other regions as well considering it’s based in the US has a “large global reach”.

“We’re starting here with something we thought we can measure and control and all being well we will look to be expanding to other spaces,” she added, describing the initiative’s main goal as “helping people have that comforting trusting voice of a peer”.

Craig also noted the added benefit for the business schools, wherein they would be able to reach a “broader and more diverse range of students” who would already be familiar with the way they work after having spoken to peers on the GMAC website.

Despite having only recently launched, Craig and Patel note the response as “hugely encouraging and positive”, with initial pilot customers and mutual partners being passionate and keen.

“Hopefully over the days and weeks and months, we’ll validate that by seeing high levels of traffic,” added Craig.