This week, Flywire (Nasdaq: FLYW) unveiled enhancements to its Student Financial Software (SFS) solution. With direct integrations into ERPs Banner Ethos and Unit4 (Agresso), Flywire delivered its first SFS implementations featuring real-time student account presentment for U.K. customers, which is then linked to Flywire payment capabilities. Flywire also introduced an enhanced solution to enable U.K. higher education institutions to automate and manage the U.S. loan disbursement process.
Currently, many higher education institutions in the U.K. lack a unified student portal offering. The payer and administrative experiences are often disparate and frustrating for payers and manual and time-consuming for administrators. In particular, U.K. institutions are challenged with enabling students to see an accurate and up-to-date account balance, providing students with flexible payment plans, and are burdened with time spent sending billing and payment communications manually.
Flywire’s SFS solution solves these client problems by providing a full-service student account portal that sits on top of a school’s receivable system and offers payers robust self-service functionality. This includes viewing account details in real time, making one-time payments, enrolling in payment plans, automated communications, access for authorized users, and more.
With real-time integration into institutions’ finance systems critical for improved visibility and streamlined reconciliation, Flywire successfully launched three new SFS implementations specifically for clients running on Unit4 (Aggresso), one of the most broadly used ERPs in the UK higher education sector, as well as one client running on Banner Ethos. These clients also benefitted from first-of-its-kind functionality, including payment plans, real-time payments and real-time student account information, enabling payers to view up-to-date and accurate account balances and make immediate payments.
Enhanced U.S. loans solution automates complex workflows for inbound loan funds
Flywire also unveiled an enhanced solution for managing loans from the U.S. government and other third-party alternative sources for students studying in the U.K. The solution enables U.K. institutions to securely receive funds owed to their institution and easily deliver the excess funds to students. Flywire now powers a complete loan disbursement solution for U.K. institutions from a single platform, enabling clients to seamlessly and compliantly process loans and properly apply funds to student accounts.
Currently, institutions in the U.K. have a very manual process for receiving U.S. loan payments from third-party funding sources. They typically spend excessive time manually processing payments, have difficulty obtaining student bank details to send credit details to, and deal with a highly regulated process with annual audits, among other challenges. Furthermore, U.S. students studying at U.K. institutions experience a lack of transparency around the entire process, which makes it difficult to plan and budget for their daily living expenses abroad.
Flywire’s updated solution provides beneficiary management, loan disbursement processing, foreign exchange calculation, and incoming and outgoing payment processing in a single platform. With automation and full transparency built in, Flywire enables institutions to securely receive and reconcile U.S. loan payments more easily and quickly, while eliminating manual work and ensuring accuracy throughout the funds flow.
Detailed features
- Performing the foreign exchange to calculate the loan amount to send to the schools as an incoming payment, and the excess amount (if applicable) to be sent to the student as an outgoing payment
- Automatically creating and sending the incoming and outgoing payments once funds have been received from the third party
- Updating the student account once the funds are disbursed
- Enabling clients to comply with loan program rules