Flywire Fusion takeaways

Like many students, Pratham Hegde, 19, was attracted to Arizona State University for the world-class education it offered. He picked the Tempe campus with the help of an education agent back home in India, and joined as one of the more than 12,000 international students on ASU campuses where 181,000 study.

Each student has a unique journey to higher education. But Hegde hit on a part of that journey that is pretty universal for many undergraduate students.

“I had zero financial experience. Everything was new to me,” Hegde said.

As higher ed becomes more expensive, students like Hegde need more from their institutions: more payment flexibility, more targeted communications, more guidance, and more tools to help make it easier to understand the total cost of higher education and act on it.

Institutions get that, and are taking actionable steps to bring higher ed’s many stakeholders and pieces together to help students reach their goals. That was clear at Flywire Fusion, Flywire’s first-ever U.S. client conference, where Hegde was part of a panel discussion led by Flywire’s EVP of Global Education Sharon Butler with fellow ASU students from the U.S. and China also adding perspective.

“Everything we do is about student success. It’s their voice that matters the most," Butler said.

Over three days, more than 100 attendees from public and private institutions gathered in Phoenix to talk about how they are making the financial path to higher education smoother for all students — whether they live in the U.S. or come to study from somewhere else in the world – and learn more about how Flywire is continually innovating technology to help them do just that. Flywire Fusion was a chance, as CMO and GM of U.S. Education Allison MacLeod put it, “to celebrate your success and talk about the most pressing issues you face today.”

At their first Flywire Fusion conference, clients from across the U.S. really grasped how much Flywire is thinking about innovation beyond international payments to help address industry-wide challenges, and how central this mission is to the product development process. That was perhaps most clear when a team of on-site Flywire engineers built seven new enhancements picked by attendees at the start of the event in less than 24 hours.

President and COO Rob Orgel, thanking clients for their ongoing collaboration and openness to share new ways to better serve students, highlighted the many achievements borne of partnering together, including new solutions such as Third-Party Invoicing.

Clients talked about how Flywire is helping them to tackle big things such as:

• Aligning teams across campus with a "one stop" for questions from students
• Keeping tuition payments coming in and students out of collections
• Better predicting cash flow by making it easier for students to enroll in payment plans
  

But what also seemed to really impress people were details that included:

• A billing and payment experience for U.S. domestic students accessible entirely in Spanish
• The thought put into automating the refund process for account balances via ACH
• Integrations to ensure everything is posted directly into the institutions’ system of record
• And so much more

1. Today's students have different needs that demand bold action by finance teams

In a two-minute history lesson on higher education technology, Flywire’s King, who has been working in the industry since 1997, took the audience on a journey familiar to many there — from the dial-up Internet days, through the first on-premise systems that allowed for online payment processing, to today. He explained that meeting the expectations and needs of digital-native students will take faster and continuous innovation – with the audience wide-eyed and nodding heads in agreement.

Deep knowledge, connection and care for higher education, alongside collaboration from partner institutions, drive Flywire’s product roadmap, Flywire’s Rethage explained to the audience, which includes things like providing more analytics and insight into student behavior, deeper system integration, and more self-service opportunities for students and institution staff.

"You have the opportunity to make a difference in the lives of students. Each of you has the power to drive change. We want to help you help more students,” he said.

3. There are many parts of the financial process to be innovated, and they are not all a massive lift

The more than a dozen institutions who shared stories, successes and advice at the event detailed several ways they are making education accessible and more affordable – for instance:

• Every valedictorian in its hometown campus of Boston is eligible for a full cost of tuition scholarship at Northeastern University.
  
  
• To help retain students with past-due tuition bills, the enrollment threshold was increased from $50 to $1,500 at the University of Colorado, Boulder.
  
  
• Eligible students who had fallen behind on payments, but close to graduation, are awarded retention effort grants to get them through at Texas A&M - San Antonio, increasing the persistence rate by 5%.
  
  
• Working with admissions to communicate about billing processes at the University of Connecticut before enrollment, and presenting the payment portal early on in the process.

Connecting and collaborating to move forward

With the variety of session content — from optimizing SFS, to the changing financial literacy and goals of the next generation, to the strategies to combat to the enrollment cliff and the effect of the foreign exchange (FX) rate on tuition for international students, clients came away with a clear sense of how to solve the problems in front of them — and with renewed energy for tackling it all with the backing of their newfound network of higher education friends.

“It is great meeting all the people who do the same things we do, to connect," said Erica Nukaya, Assistant Controller of Students and Grants at Reed College. “The sessions have been great and the facility is lovely.”