Oklahoma Panhandle State University wanted to make it easier for international students to pay through their TouchNet system, and make it easier for the finance team to process those payments.
The Challenge
Oklahoma Panhandle State University is a public state university offering undergraduate degrees. About 1,200 students attend per year, with a growing international student body. They’re renowned for their agriculture and nursing programs, as well as several successful sports teams.
They’ve been using TouchNet for a decade, but for the first several years the only option for international students to pay was by wire transfer. This brought challenges for both the students and the university.
“Before we had TransferMate, the only option that we had for students to make international payments was a wire from a bank,” said Liz McMurphy, Vice President of Fiscal Affairs at Oklahoma Panhandle State University. “That wire might have to travel through a bank in New York, and then into our local bank here, and then they would issue a check, or they’d issue a payment where we could apply it to their account… It was a convoluted process. Depending on the country, a lot of times it would take an inordinate amount of time to get to us.”
These delays would cause problems for the university finance team, and stress for the students. It was also a costly payment method for the students.
“It was expensive for students to send a wire” continued Liz. “And, when you’re sending so much money internationally, you want to know it’s arrived. A bank transfer meant a lot of waiting and uncertainty on the student's end. They don't know where it's sitting, who it's waiting on. For us, when they called us, we sometimes weren’t able to tell them where it was because we hadn’t any way of knowing. Even if we could find out, it meant a lot of phone calls to banks.”
Matching those payments may not be easy either. If a student forgot to include pieces of information on their bank wire transfer, it resulted in manual work from the university team to match the payment to the student.
“We'd have the amount, but oftentimes, we wouldn't know what account to apply it to,” said Liz. “Over time, we tried to adapt our instructions to make sure the student ID number was included, which if it's a new student, they might not even have an ID number yet. So, we tried to refine the process to try to eliminate some of those issues. But of course, you may have it still come up on occasion.”
The Solution
In 2021, Oklahoma Panhandle State University decided to add the TransferMate integration to their TouchNet platform for international student payments. They decided to make it the only option for students to pay internationally, which streamlined everything within TouchNet.
“The speed of transfers is much quicker,” said Liz. “I can’t put a definite timeframe on it, as there’s always nuances depending on what country it’s coming from and things like that, but it’s definitely eliminated and reduced a lot of the waiting game for students.”
Beyond the actual speed of the money moving across borders, the students are also notified directly in their student profile that the payment has been made. This reduces uncertainty for the student, and saves them making inquiries to the OPSU team. It’s also saved the students money.
“Everything's real-time. They can see everything as soon as it occurs, and that enables them to see what we see. And, it’s definitely decreased fees for them. The fees are minimal.”
For the Oklahoma Panhandle State University finance team, the integration has made processing and matching the payments much easier compared to wire transfers from the student’s bank.
“There's a lot less of trying to match where it's supposed to go that we used to have with the wire process. It’s all pretty seamless on our end. It's just another payment type to process. It reduces our administrative time significantly where we don't have to do the back and forth with the bank.”
The Results
The TransferMate integration with TouchNet has helped significantly in speed of transfers, reduced costs to the students, and reduced manual work for the OPSU team.
“Our international population has increased over the past several years, and our shift to TransferMate has coincided with that need and made a really big difference for those students and their experience in a positive way.”
Liz has found herself recommending Transfermate to other universities using TouchNet.
“We have a weekly call with other bursars at other institutions in the Oklahoma State A&M system. When TransferMate has been brought up, I’ve been able to talk about our experience. I have and do recommend the solution – I think it’s led to others implementing it themselves.”
The Final Word
“The speed of transfers is much quicker… it’s reduced fees for students…. And there’s a lot less matching of payments for our team.”
- Liz McMurphy, Vice President of Fiscal Affairs, Oklahoma Panhandle State University
To get in touch about the TransferMate integration with TouchNet, go to the TouchNet Partner Directory.
