In today’s environment of mobile payments and digital wallets, here’s what students (and parents) want when it comes to tuition payment! Schools are catching on and offering a wider range of payment options.
24/7 Online Access – Convenience is key. The most important feature is self-payment from any device at any time. With an online payment portal, students can make a payment 24/7. Additionally, students with an account have access to past and upcoming payments and any outstanding balance.
If your school offers payment plans, these can also be accessed online. Students can update their payment information to a new card or bank account without a call to your office. They can also confirm that an upcoming payment has been scheduled.
Tuition Bills via Email & Email Reminders – We’re not saying you have to go paperless, but paper is easy to misplace. A tuition bill delivered by email, on the other hand, can include a link to “Pay Now”. Since Generation Z prefers mobile payments, this is a perfect option. If the payment due date comes closer and the bill has not been paid, your office can send out an email reminder with another link to “Pay Now”. With Compuwerx TuitionPay, all funds are deposited to your school’s bank account in 12 hours.
Online Security
Students want to know their online payments are secure. Fortunately, ACH payments are protected by a variety of evolving security measures. Use of encryption and tokenization further prevent hackers from gaining meaningful data. Encryption protects private data by turning the data into a coded message from the sender to the receiver. Without an encryption key to decode it, third parties cannot understand the data should they get their hands on it. Tokenization takes stored data such as a credit card number and assigns it a random sequence of characters. Although it references the original data, this tokenized number is meaningless to a hacker who might access it from a data breach.
Checks can not only be accidentally misplaced, but can be stolen from seemingly secure locations such as mailboxes. In fact, over a third of bank fraud is check fraud.
Ability to Pay with a Credit Card
Yes, credit card fees are higher. However, some students like the option to pay with a credit card for the reward points that come with many loyalty cards. Your school can choose whether to absorb the credit card fees (typically from 1.5% to 3.5%) , or add the transparent fee when the student chooses to pay with a credit card. Since many credit cards offer cash back or rewards of around 2%, this can be worth it for many students.
Interested in taking the next steps to improve online tuition payment for your students? Contact us for a live demo or to learn more.