NOTTINGHAM TRENT UNIVERSITY SUCCESS

Nottingham Trent process over £50 million in tuition and accommodation fees using WPM Education's Recurring Card Payment System.

REQUIREMENT

Their existing set up was a combination of taking all three instalments manually through a card terminal and an online facility for some transactions.

Staff would need to attempt a payment and, if it failed, carry out one or further attempts a number of days later to minimise the amount of debt chasing that needed to be done. Incorrect card details would also not be filtered out until the first payment was attempted. The online facility assisted in the collection process but as a consequence the University was holding personal card details on its own computer systems.

In addition to the additional staff costs associated with collecting these payments it also had a negative impact on the institution's cash flow. This also affected the customer experience as potentially students, or the person paying on behalf of the student, were having their account debited several days after the intended instalment date.

Due to the amount of students involved (several thousand per annum), the correspondence overhead and associated staff time was also significant. This covered the confirmation of the plan set up, advance notice of instalment dates and amounts, and further notification when payments had failed.

Finally, and while the issue is perhaps better publicised now, there was a serious concern about the security of cardholder details as they were being kept either on the University's own systems or on paper and, potentially, could easily be taken away or copied.

SOLUTION

This permitted recurring card payment plans to be set up via a user and administrator web front-end and for the payments then to be automatically processed.

The system was developed, and later further refined, specifically with the requirements of an institution in mind that needed to process high volumes of transactions using a customer's credit or debit card. Specifically the system looked to streamline the whole process while providing the highest possible level of security by:

1. Instalment set up - Allowing payers to set up instalments via a secure web-based interface and picking their payment options. This included validating their card details in real-time and ensuring no invalid details were entered.

2. Correspondence - Generating automatic correspondence in email form confirming the set up of an instalment plan and providing advance notices in respect to any changes.

3. Collection - Automatically process payments, and any associated retries, and providing the customer with an e-mail receipt of the payment.

4. Failures - Automatically notifying payers of payment failure and asking them to carry out specific actions to make payment or update their card details.

5. Management - Providing a secure web-based management interface through which instalment plans can be set up, maintained and cancelled. Through this set up there is no requirement to ever show staff card numbers and any sensitive cardholder details are stored in encrypted form.

RESULTS

This chart illustrates that a very significant proportion of payments are made by debit cards. While this chart does not split Visa into debit and credit cards, the total value by debit cards is close to 50%. This illustrates the trend of payers towards utilising recurring card payments using debit cards even when Direct Debits is given as an option.

The system and its functionality is now fundamental to Nottingham Trent's payment collection with approximately 75% of all payers who choose instalments choosing recurring card payments over Direct Debits.