With a singular focus on higher education, Ellucian has been empowering colleges and universities with powerful, enterprise solutions for over 50 years. Now, more than 2,900 higher education institutions across the globe rely on Ellucian for everything from managing business workflows to improving the student experience. This has been the driving force behind the long-standing partnership between Ellucian and Flywire.
“Flywire’s integrations significantly reduce complexity for institution administrators wanting to offer more flexible payment options to students and their families, without significant investment,” said Flywire CTO, David King. Ellucian and Flywire have worked together to build and standardize multiple, robust integration points to seamlessly connect Ellucian Banner and Colleague systems to the Flywire payment and/or Student Financial Software (SFS) solutions.
The integration allows Ellucian clients to leverage Flywire’s powerful Global Payment Network, allowing their students to pay their tuition fees in 140+ currencies across 240+ countries and territories with hundreds of payment options either via a payment request link or an embedded checkout experience. Finance teams can pre-populate key information to minimize data errors, and the data flows securely but effortlessly between Flywire and Ellucian Banner or Colleague, allowing real-time payment updates and automated reconciliation.
Ellucian at a glance
Ellucian + Flywire Payment Integration
Whenever a payment is needed, at any point along the student journey, the Flywire Payment Integration creates a seamless payment experience for international and domestic students and their families and delivers process efficiencies and time savings for university finance teams.
Before integrating Flywire, payments were causing problems for the Accounts Payable team and students alike at Carleton University, Canada. More often than not, students would input incorrect ID information along with their payment, especially in their first year, making it hard for the accounts team to identify and reconcile those payments; resulting delays in payments showing as confirmed within the student account prompted panicked calls to the finance office.
Now, using SSO (single sign-on), Carleton University students can now make international payments directly from their student account. Not only do they now have many more payment options, making it quick and easy to pay the university from their home country, but their student ID is pre-populated, making reconciliation easy.
Sandy Mazereeuw, Accounts Payable Manager for Carleton University commented, “Due to external changes, we had to have an extremely quick integration with Flywire and despite the short turnaround time, implementation was seamless. We have always felt well supported both during the implementation and afterwards. The team were initially wary of having to learn a new system but have found working within the Flywire portal to be easy and intuitive.”
Ellucian + Flywire SFS Integration
The Flywire SFS integration with Ellucian goes beyond simplifying payment to delivering maximum revenue management and back-office efficiency. It enables universities and colleges to integrate the Flywire SFS solution directly into their existing Banner or Colleague workflows to seamlessly manage the entire student financial journey–from billing, payment plans and one-time payments to past-due collections–all within one platform.
Students access Flywire’s SFS system directly within their student account and can self-serve numerous functions, including viewing their account activity and current balance (incorporating anticipated aid), setting up and managing payment plans, making a payment, downloading a monthly, termly, or yearly statement, and more. For Reed College, a small private institution in Portland, Oregon, payment plan enrollments have increased by 50%, and inbound support calls to the Student Account team have reduced dramatically since integrating Flywire SFS with Banner.
However, when students do need support, the SFS Ellucian integration makes it much easier for institution staff to provide it. Though they have more functionality, administrative staff have the same dashboard view as their students, providing a comprehensive view of all activity and communications and making it easier and quicker to identify and rectify any issues than with Reed’s previous system.
I was recently on a call with a parent, who couldn’t view their child’s account details or make payments, because they weren't authorized to do so. But, within five minutes, I was able to grant them access. All it required was for their child to give that authorization via a link I could send from the SFS dashboard to the parent’s phone.
Better together
Flywire integrations enable institutions to consolidate the many payment options offered in one place, accelerating funds flow, easing reconciliation, and streamlining operational efficiencies.
For students and families, Flywire integrations provide a more seamless and highly tailored, convenient, and secure digital payment experience, which can be customized by institution, country, and currency.
As a long-standing, and highly valued partner we are thrilled to be working so closely with Ellucian on integrations that enhance the capabilities of our joint solutions for the higher education institutions across the globe.