The software – designed to assist institutions manage the CAS, visa and arrival process from agents and students in over 100 countries – will also be rolled out to Australia and New Zealand in 2022.

“Covid has really fast-tracked the digital transformation agenda in our industry,” said Jeffrey Williams CEO & co-founder of Enroly.

“As CAS Shield is built from the ground up to address CAS, visa and arrival it essentially represents an ‘out of the box’ digital transformation opportunity for universities. The responsiveness and speed with which our partners have implemented positive change has been really impressive.”

To date since 2017 Enroly has raised a total of £2m in funding, with Larsen Ventures acting as lead investor – the family office of Peter Larsen, a founder of Navitas.

“We are on track for our target of 30% of UK universities using the software in the next academic year. We are currently on-boarding a new UK university every three weeks,” Williams told The PIE.

Enroly is reconfiguring the software to “meet the workflow requirements of universities in Australia and New Zealand”, he noted. “[We] will be doing a full roll-out to these markets in 2022.”

The technology augments university staff by increasing their efficiency, he continued.

“That doesn’t mean less staff, it actually means more time to focus on critical problem solving, customer service and other human-centric tasks that were often neglected due to lack of time and opportunity.

“In fact, we often see university teams expanding to capitalise on the newly discovered opportunity.”

Universities can reduce attrition at key stages of the recruitment lifecycle and improve conversion rates in their existing pipeline, he suggested.

A recent case study with the University of Greenwich in the UK found that implementing the software retained the institution an estimated revenue in excess of £3 million for the academic year, as well as improved the student and staff experience.

“With Enroly’s specialist support, we can now enable staff with compliance-by-design technology to streamline application administration workflows and ensure our students & agents benefit from a simpler and more secure process,” Jane Harrington, vice-chancellor of University of Greenwich, said in a statement.

“We can now enable staff with compliance-by-design technology to streamline application administration workflows”

The study found that Greenwich recorded a fivefold increase in administrative processing speed, a 62% reduction in manual student-staff communication and a 75% reduction in enrolment attrition.

The Enroly software also eliminates “the high potential” for manual errors during critical periods in the international enrolment procedure, the company added.

“It is often overlooked that we are the only pure tech product on the market focused on the bottom of funnel international student recruitment. We think that is pretty exciting,” Williams concluded.