International payment and collection provider Uni-Pay has been providing its services to universities and language schools since 2010. Director Simon Read talks about the growing international payments industry and the addition of an online application service to help prevent agent fraud.
The PIE: When was Uni-Pay set up, how did you get the idea?
SR: Uni-Pay is part of Collective Enterprises Limited which began in the 1980s and was started up by two ex-senior executives of the NUS to provide purchasing services and a new billing platform for student unions buying beer. In 1995 we launched our Clearing House service and started to deal with international payments for a range of customers including educators and agents. However, this is a strictly business to business service and many educators contacted us to ask if we could process fee payments from their international students directly.
Uni-Pay has grown out of this, and we really came to market about three years ago with a platform dedicated to educators collecting fees from students. It’s gone down very well. We have a lot of university and language schools as customers using it to collect payments from their students. Uni Pay is now the core of Collective Enterprises’ business and we have taken a strategic decision to be a niche player in the education sector.
“We have institutional clients all over the place, in Chile, Ecuador, Argentina, Spain, you name it”
The PIE: Do you only serve UK clients?
SR: No. We have institutional clients all over the place, in Chile, Ecuador, Argentina, Spain, you name it. These are mainly language schools while in the UK we also have an increasing number of HE providers as customers. Overall we have about 60-70 clients.
The PIE: There’s a lot of growth in the international payments space, with players like Western Union Business Solutions and PeerTransfer becoming more prominent. Are you noticing the growth?
SR: We are seeing growth. There are different kinds of providers in this space. Many smaller exchange providers have come and gone, because they weren’t successful and this is usually because they don’t understand the education sector, and are not prepared to invest enough on sector specific solutions. But we are seeing large investments being made by the operators you mention.
The PIE: What sort of things do you need to understand about the sector to be successful?
SR: It’s understanding the time frame under which educators have to collect payments from students and how important this is as part of the overall application process. If you take a university, it’s highly likely that the first time they ask for a payment it is for a deposit, which for most UK institutions must be taken before the institutions issue a CAS (needed for the application to obtain the students’ visa). The payment is therefore ingrained in the process, and any delay in reconciling the payment can lead to a delayed application or even a student deciding to go elsewhere. FX houses are sometimes not deft enough to adapt to this.
“Many smaller exchange providers have come and gone, because they weren’t successful and this is usually because they don’t understand the education sector”
The PIE: How does your system work then?
SR: Usually if a student was coming from Singapore to the University of East Anglia, say, they would go their bank which would charge them for an international transfer based on high street exchange rates. When UEA receives the funds it would probably have reconciliation issues, because it is likely to be received minus some element of fees and perhaps some of the referencing that universities require. This delays receipt of the payment and the issuing of the CAS.
If they go through Uni Pay, we convert to Singapore dollars for them, and ask them how they would like to pay — by bank transfer or credit card. If it’s the first, they make the payment through our local account in the country and avoid the international transfer fees. We then pay UEA in the UK along with other students’ payments in bulk, by BACS.
If they pay online by credit card, we will debit their account in Singapore dollars – and they would see exactly how much was coming off their account immediately. Usually you’d have to wait until the end of the month to find out. We manage bank accounts in various countries around the world, and do the same with credit cards. We also allow institutions to upload schedules of payments due. When they operate like this we actively chase the payments for them and effectively take on an element of credit control.
The PIE: Where do you take your commission?
SR: We charge a transaction fee to the students, which is as low as £7, but we pass on the benefits of avoiding the exchange rate fees to the students too. The Singaporean student would probably have to pay three times as much if he didn’t use us. The university transaction fees for incoming payments also disappear.
The PIE: You’ve also teamed up with Centurus on an online application service. What does it offer?
SR: That is focused on HE at the moment. Centurus is a small organisation, run by an ex-student from the University of Central Lancashire, Dawood Fard. He saw that there was no uniform way of students or agents to submit applications for individuals who need Tier 4 Visas —the basic steps are the same for everyone, but in terms of how an institution or agent goes about it and manages the communication around financial documentation and keeping records is entirely up to them. This causes issues when an institution is dealing with 20-30 agents and becomes messy and hard to manage.
“Some universities have systems to handle the application process but they tend to be inefficient”
This lack of structure also gives scope for loopholes and potential visa fraud. We met Dawood and decided there was crossover, given the importance of payments in the university application process and ensuring a student’s visa requirements are met. Dawood’s idea was great but he needed support in how to take it to market, so we have entered into a partnership and have taken Centurus into our portfolio of products. Needless to say the Uni-Pay payment process has also been fully integrated into the Centurus system.
The PIE: It seems a good idea given the tougher compliance expectations placed on universities by the government.
SR: Yes. You had more than 300,000 overseas students studying here last year and it does continue to grow. Most universities also have strategies to increase internationalisation and want more students and competition is high. Universities have a lot of management systems in place that focus on day to day issues after the student is enrolled and on campus; some also have systems to handle the application process but they tend to be inefficient.
The time taken to process an overseas student from application to offer can take far too long. Some bits of the process are too convoluted. So our system helps to improve the application process and reduces burden. We also provide universities far more data than was available previously, so they can really monitor their international admissions performance – and the performance of the agents that they use.
“In the payment space, Uni-Pay has seen business double year on year since it launched, so there definitely is growth”
The PIE: How does it prevent fraud?
SR: The system is really designed to manage communication between students, agents and institutions. Users internally who are dealing with many agents on a daily basis can share data on agents and flag bad experiences they’ve had for others to see. They can also restrict agents to applications from certain countries only.
The PIE: So do you think demand for such admissions systems is going to grow?
SR: In the payment space, Uni-Pay has seen business double year on year since it launched, so there definitely is growth. Clearly there are more providers in the market but at the same time it is a growth market globally. We estimate international students coming to the UK are costing universities alone £34 million in banking and credit card charges. For language schools and colleges the figure will also be in the tens of millions.
With Centurus I think there aren’t any other products like it at the moment. So while it’s quite new, we see a lot of opportunity for growth, as universities look to see their conversion rate increase by improving efficiency.
