I'll just repeat one more time that having it embedded in the billing and payments portal that really was the biggest factor. That's when we saw more adoption with students. That's where they're looking for options.

Welcome to Focus, a podcast dedicated to the business of Higher Education. I'm your host, Heather Richmond, and we will be exploring the challenges and opportunities facing today's higher learning institutions. In this episode, I caught up with Mike Pilman from Tulane University's accounts receivable office, about how they support international students by simplifying cross border payments. Hi, Mike, thanks so much for joining us today.

Thanks for having me.

Well, we have a great topic to cover today, international students and how Tulane supports their payment experience. But first, I want to learn a little bit more about you and your background in higher education.

Sure, well, I have about 25 years of experience in higher education. I actually first started work as a work study student at TulaneÕs IT Help Desk call center. You learn pretty quickly in a job like that to become a jack of all trades from helping students register for classes to assisting faculty with administrative system procedures. It was a really formative experience for me and ultimately led to a full-time position at our card services office during the early days of the university's efforts to online a lot of our student services to the internet. A lot of that work was being done at the time to integrate an expanding portfolio of record management systems. Today, I think we now operate something like 26 different systems for student records alone. This prepared me well for a new position that was opening up at the time in our Student Accounts Receivable office with a focus on automating electronic payment processing and various other campus commerce activities. Unfortunately, I took that position just three weeks before the Gulf South and Tulane was devastated by Hurricane Katrina. The very weekend that students were moving on to campus for the start of the fall 2005 term. We all volunteer to help our students move into campus. So we were all on campus, moving boxes, getting people in the dorm rooms, and about halfway through the day like, pack it all back up, put it back in the trucks, and we're out of here. So long story short, by the time any of us could access our campus again, we had learned that we lost our data center, and the off-site backup from floodwaters for accounts receivables, homegrown payment processing system. In the months after we lost four staff just through people moving their families and that kind of thing, including our director, who had been the person who personally developed that homegrown system. So we essentially had to rebuild what we could from copies of Fortran code our director had stored on his home computer. And developed other new processes altogether. The next few years was sort of like a fury of development work as we recovered from that event and kicked off my offices entrance into the hosted system world for probably obvious reasons. So I've worked in accounts receivable since in a variety of roles, most notably as the student accounts functional lead for student system implementation. And now also with TouchNet as well for our front-end billing and payment services. I'm just one part of a big team here, and I'm so proud of the progress we've made. 

You absolutely should be. And I tell you what, if there's not a better going to the cloud story than that one. First off, that's always a challenge when there's homegrown, somebody home grew that.

Yeah, that was the biggest takeaway. I mean, one was we didn't realize how vulnerable we were, both our data center and our off-site backup, were both stored on the first floor and flooded, so that was the big takeaway. And then with homegrown systems, you're entirely responsible for it. There's no, you know, 1-800 TouchNet that you can call to say, ŌHey, help us out.Ķ

Exactly, you're taking on all that ownership and responsibility. And then like you said, if somebody moves or something happens, and nobody knows the code, then there's nobody that can come in there as opposed to having a team to help. So wow, you made a lot of transitions. And it sounds like you were in the right place at the right time to learn a ton.

Yeah, it was a big learning experience, for sure.

Wow. That's amazing. So beyond that tragedy. Let's learn a little bit more about Tulane University. Other than how awesome it is to be in New Orleans, of course.

Yeah. So Tulane was founded in New Orleans in 1834 by the state legislature as the Medical College of Louisiana. It was a public school at the time. We've grown quite a bit since then. And today, Tulane is a private research institution with 10 undergraduate, graduate and professional schools with about 14,500 students annually. A little more than half are undergraduates with a strong focus on multidisciplinary degree programs. So just as an example, we operate a number of four plus one programs where students complete a combined bachelors and master's degree, as well as other longer term tracks that lead into our medicine, law and architecture programs, among others. Many people listening will already know that New Orleans is a small town with a big attitude. And the Big Easy is a melting pot of music and food and culture, with an estimated annual draw of about 19 million visitors from around the globe to 135 festivals from Mardi Gras to Jazz Fest, and everything in between. The festive atmosphere of New Orleans is certainly a frequent reason of note when students are asked why they chose Tulane. So we're in accounts receivable, just a little bit about our office. So we serve our students with 11 full-time staff and three student workers.

That's amazing. And yes, every time there's a conference in New Orleans, everybody wants to go. And it's always a lot of fun, we probably have a little too much fun with the music, and then itÕs hard to go back to a conference in the morning.

Well, that's what you're supposed to do. I enjoy when the conference is coming to New Orleans too because I get to go and party with the guys who are visiting. 

Well, so you're used to people, from all over the world coming and visiting your campus coming and visiting your city. And so you probably have a pretty large international student population.

Yeah, we do. So a total of about 10% of our population is international. We do also have domestic students who have financial resources that are abroad as well. So from a payment perspective, we also have another smaller population where, particularly from places like Canada and the United Kingdom, and so forth, we will accept international payments for those. About 90 countries overall in the last year, with the largest three populations from China, Spain and India. We're currently working to expand our international population, actually, particularly in our graduate degree programs, they've most recently partnered with a recruiting firm, with an in person presence all around the world, to help us attract those graduate students.

Well, that's great. And that is a pretty big percentage. And so you think about all the different countries that you're supporting, that's a really significant amount of tuition and fees that are coming through cross border payments. And so what's that experience been like from a payment perspective, for those students?

Yeah, so there's a couple of significant challenges that are pretty unique to international students. For one, unlike our domestic students, who have opportunities to apply for federal aid through federal and state programs, our international students are by and large cash payers. You know, costs range from as low as the value of, say, our student medical insurance premium for undergraduate exchange programs to as much as $80,000 per year for some of our professional programs. So another significant factor is simple, unfamiliarity with US systems. So, from establishing a local bank account to navigating the complexities of cross border payments, particularly when you're dealing with large sums, it's not a matter of just paying that term bill, but also navigating the monetary policies, both here in the US and then their home country.

That's a really good point, and probably something that maybe a lot of folks don't think about. ItÕs one thing to say we accept international payments, but thinking about that student experience, and what that's like in terms of what does it mean, and what is the currency exchange? And where do I have to go? What do I have to know? And then if they come and drop off over $10,000 in cash, then there's that whole regulatory side, too. So what does that look like for students? Are they just kind of confused? Do they come talk to you?

Yeah, it's a little better now, now that we have some partners to help us out. But that's always been one of the biggest challenges for us in student accounts, is assisting students with those payment options that frankly, we're not that familiar with. Oftentimes the student will be more familiar with their home countries banking practices than we are. So, particularly when you're talking about exchange rates that have market adjustments almost to the minute, and it's just really unfamiliar to us in student accounts. For many years, students basically had like two options. So they would do a direct wire from their home country to Tulane. Or in some cases, students, like you said, would literally arrive at the airport with a backpack full of cash. So thankfully, we don't see that much anymore these days. It does happen on occasion, but it's rare. So several years ago, we partnered with TransferMate, and a couple other services to begin accepting cross border payments through a 24/7 portal. The portal assists students with making payments in their home country and currency for US dollar delivery to Tulane. It includes a current exchange calculator right there in the portal, it uses TulaneÕs payment amount to determine how much they should pay locally, so it just feeds that in for them. So TransferMate handles all the details of the currency exchange, the cash clearing, the transmission to Tulane directly with payers, who in many cases are not even the person attending the university, could be a parent or some other financial resource aunts and uncles or even a foreign consulate. So we've seen this payment channel grow over time, and for many, it's now a preferred method of payment.

Yeah, that's really interesting. And I'm going to assume it's probably the preferred because it's integrated, it's easier to access. But what are you seeing? Why do you think this has been better for students? 

Yeah, so that really was the biggest gain, actually. So we've been with TransferMate for 11 years now. But just recently, we've added that integration piece directly into the TouchNet portal. And that's really the biggest gain, that's where students are reviewing their bill. And that's where they're looking for payment options. And now, just right in line with that bill payment, they see they can make an international transfer. So you've got the credit card option, the electronic check option, and then you'll have an international payment option. When students click that, it brings up TransferMateÕs payment widget within the UDOT commerce portal, and presents them options to pay from over 200 countries. So they just make that selection on which country they want to pay from. Students are then able to select from a range of quotes based on which currencies or transfer options are available. One of the great things about this is that some countries will have multiple options, just as an example, European countries will often have both a Euro option and a US dollar option and a couple others to pay from that country. They also work with other payment processors that operate in those countries. So a Chinese student, for example, could present payment with a bank transfer or a credit card or a WeChat pay, or a number of other options. So it presents all of that to the student and details the sort of fees that are associated with each, a lot of people will be familiar with the difference between fees for a bank transfer versus a credit card transaction, there's usually a pretty big difference there. So anyway, that's all presented to the student. Once they select that quote, and it's initiated, TransferMate then handles all of the regulatory and transaction processing, including tracking information that's presented to both the payer and us at Tulane. And then the payment is automatically deposited to our account and posted to the student's account through the TouchNet interface.

Wow, that's amazing. It sounds like it's not only a better student experience, but this has to make your life a lot easier, too.

Yeah, it does. Particularly it saves a lot of time with transaction processing. So for many years, it was just us pulling up a portal, looking at payments that were received, and then manually typing that into student accounts, the tracking information was there, so it wasn't that difficult, but it was data entry.

Anytime in this day and age, if you can automate, you definitely want to automate. While obviously, itÕs way more intuitive for students now to find that option, since TransferMateÕs right there in the payment portal. But you also do some education, I believe, right? So how do you educate international students on how to make use payment options?

Yeah, so I'll just repeat one more time that having it embedded in the billing and payments portal, that really was the biggest factor. That's when we saw more adoption with students. That's where they're looking for options. In addition to that, our partners assist payers directly. So TransferMate, for example, offers 24/7 multilingual customer support, including live chat, phone, email, text message, and few other options. It's actually proactive support on their part. So if they're already handling a payment for a student, they'll initiate contact if the payment seems to be stuck or additional documentation is needed.  So at Tulane we also provide general advice on a payment options webpage that's tailored specifically to international students. We have that page listed on our Student Accounts Receivable website. And we also have a similar version with our Office of International Students. And we also have a presence in a special orientation that our Office of International Students presents just for international students and is tailored to their needs.

That makes a lot of sense, especially what you were saying earlier in terms of international students coming here and they have to learn everything new. They have to understand US banking systems or payment systems.

Yeah, just really things that we completely take for granted. As simple as, if you rent an apartment off campus, this is what the landlord will expect from you for a monthly rent check. That kind of thing or if you go eat at a restaurant, this is what the waiter will expect for a tip and, just really basic stuff like that. So our International Students Office works hard to help students really integrate into the local culture. 

That's really interesting, like you said, some things that you just don't think about. That's amazing. So this seems so easy. I know when we talked earlier, it's really one of those things that it just works. But let's take a step back and think about what was life like before implementing TransferMate? And how did the international students make payments? Where was their confusion?

Yeah, so before we were live with any of these options, I'm a little embarrassed to say that we had our bank wire information on a public website for download, we would direct students to download our wire instructions, and then essentially leave them with the work of figuring out exchange rates and transmission details with their sending bank. Several years ago, we started to see an uptick in check fraud attempts using this public information that we had. Fortunately, we have strong withdrawal controls set with our bank, so none were successful. But this was certainly a topic of concern to our banking partner, who was attempting to negotiate these checks an account that appears to be good on the surface level. So you know, over the years, we've also seen a few bad actors who purported to offer integrated payments to Tulane, but would charge exorbitant fees or have unclear delivery practices. And then either of those cases, what we found most often was insufficient information received in the wire transaction, where we couldn't figure out which account of 15,000 student accounts to post a credit to. So we frequently had payments that were slightly insufficient due to hidden fees that the sending bank would charge or through miscalculation on the payerÕs part and a number of other options like that.

Well, I'll tell you, you're not alone. I've heard many of these stories, and there's still this practice happening in some places. And you think it's making it easier for the students just to have all the wire information out there, publicly available, but the bad guys are everywhere, and you have to really watch out for the fraudulent activity that they're going to try to do.

Yeah, definitely. And we do still accept direct wires, of course, we have to, but now payers have to request that information. And we only share it to the studentÕs payer who's going to make that payment.

Oh, that's really good. So again, everybody listening public service announcement here, if you still have your bank wire information out there publicly on your website, we encourage you to remove that, or be opening yourself up to more risk of potential fraud. And I like the idea of you still have that as an option. But you're going to have them contact you to get the details as opposed to just having it out there.

Yeah, that's right. And I'm sure many people listening will already be familiar that that's important, because you'll have the payers bank account will have their own controls, particularly if it's being paid from a corporate account, or some sort of specialized investment account, and so forth. So you do still have to be able to have that direct wire option. But you just want to protect that information, put it behind security.

Absolutely. And again, just thinking back the importance of the embedded international payments with TransferMate, not only is that a better experience for students, but as you were just saying, a lot of times with those wire payments, you would just have a random payment and have no idea who it will apply it to. So this has to make life a little bit easier on the back end from reconciliation standpoint for you, right?

Oh, yeah, for sure. So there are a lot of gains in this. That was one of the big ones. So unclaimed payments, processing, figuring out where things go. For a while we had this procedure where basically we would receive a wire, it would have no student information or even say it would have the payerÕs information, it was not the students. So there was no link there. So, we would just hold that in an unclaimed payments fund until somebody called us and claimed it. And eventually, you have to return it if you can't post it. But that's a big manual process that we want to avoid, obviously, we want to post payments when we receive them. So students are not missing due dates. So that was another frequent occurrence is that, students when they were on their own, trying to calculate how much to send in euro or yen, or whatever the currency is that they were sending. Oftentimes, they would not factor in the fees that they're sending bank was being charged or they would miss calculate the current exchange rate that would be applied and that kind of stuff, so we'd also have cases of insufficient funding. But integrating all this with TransferMate, they provide tracking that gives you point to point information about each transaction so we're not going to receive a deposit from TransferMate without know exactly who that belongs to. So that really simplifies the reconciliation problem.

And again, it's automatically posted to the student account. So you don't have to worry about posting that. And then because I'm thinking about reconciliation, and because it's already in your account, I assume that makes it easier when you go to balance. It's just there.

Yeah, it just works out, we're probably not even using all of the reconciliation functionality that's available in reporting. It's really simple. So TransferMate will give you that report that says, you're going to receive a deposit to your bank account on this date, and it includes these six transactions. It's really easy to meet that up in reconciliation.

And I know we talked too, a little bit about Tulane has an overpayment policy. So you can't have somebody make an overpayment and then come back and ask for a refund. Can you talk a little bit about how this helps in that scenario?

Yeah. So we have an overpayment policy in general, that is in our terms, in our agreement disclosure statement, but TouchNet has payment limits set within the portal itself. So we set a payment limit where a student can't initiate, domestically or internationally, they can't initiate a payment that is over a certain balance beyond what is actually due at the time. So with TransferMate integration, that policy applies because it's passing the payment amount into TransferMateÕs payment widget, so they have to adhere to the policy that's already set up with TouchNet. And that's really helped us with having far less frequent overpayments. And it's making it generally more difficult to initiate a payment that would overpay the account.

Sounds like, overall, it just really simplified everything that you're doing when it comes to international payments.

Yeah, it sure does. 

So how has this impacted your staff? And what are they working on now?

So we have plenty to work on. And this really simplified the work of payment processing in this regard. So, obviously, the biggest gain would be automatic posting of payments. So we're not manually scanning through bank statements trying to glean out student information from wire memo line items on a bank statement, that's a big gain. We also have the reduced volume of unclaimed payment processing, we have reduced occurrences of insufficient payment or missed due dates. And by and large, for most of our staff, they really don't have any direct interaction with international transfers, because students are initiating it themselves. They're being helped by TransferMate. If any problems come in, and the payment is automatically posted to student accounts. And essentially, at that point, the student is sort of done with our office, if they've paid their bill, they're not interested in talking to accounts receivable if their balance is zero, so it's a very, very limited interaction.

Yeah, probably took what some of your team said was probably the worst part of their day in terms of sifting through all those wires and unknown payments, trying to figure out who it is and doing a lot of data entry to now it's just not even something that's part of their day.

Yeah, that's right. We try to limit data entry as much as possible, for obvious reasons. I mean, for one, users are prone to make errors, particularly if they're distracted during a busy period. So it just really simplifies work in that regard.

Absolutely. And you were just saying too that, it really helps with the missed due dates. And this may be something kind of going back to the education of international students and realizing there's due dates. And so can you maybe explain a little bit about that? Were they missing due dates? And has this helped that?

So, obviously speaking as a longtime accounts receivable rep, we care a lot about our due dates, and we want to make compliance to our payment schedule as easy to navigate as possible. So TransferMate really helps the payer obtain a full understanding of the transaction fees that are applicable and the timing of delivery prior to initiation of that payment. So we still have cases of underpayment where a payer chooses to send a lower amount, but it's less frequent now with the payment balance integration I mentioned before, where the payment amount is just being passed through the TouchNet portal. So we have other gains in tracking and automatic posting, that's helped us out a lot as well. Sometimes the transmission is delayed through no fault of the payer through the effects of global politics or odious requirements to send payment to the US. And TransferMateÕs tracking reports really help us navigate recovery from those circumstances with students if a due date is missed. What we certainly don't want to do is penalize a student for an earnest effort to make a payment. And this connects the dots for us.

And so they're making the payment, they're doing it on time. And we mentioned a little bit about because of having some of the checks and balances in place, there's not the ability to do over payments, but sometimes we talk about cross border international payments, the money laundering becomes an issue. And so has TransferMate helped you with some of those concerns?

Yeah, they do. So principally, the payment flow integration with TouchNet I mentioned before, regarding payment limits. I'm sure folks will be familiar with international students who just don't understand the process will attempt to overpay their student account, in an effort to then receive a cash disbursement locally, so that they can pay for their off campus expenses, living in housing, that kind of stuff. And unfortunately, that kind of activity is prohibited. So, TransferMate is fully compliant with money services, business regulations, which includes an anti-money laundering program, I have to admit a lot of that stuff is over my head, I really appreciate their work on that topic. They also handle a lot of reporting requirements for transaction amounts over $10,000 and some other more mundane requirements with the IRS and home country regulations.

That's probably why you have a third party who understands all of that level of detail and stays compliant.

Yeah, we know we wouldn't do a good job. So we appreciate the help. So one of the best features actually in day to day life and student accounts is the ability to return a payment back to the originator. So this happens from time to time during registration, add/drop periods or with changing housing preferences where you know, somebody is able to make a payment, but then that ends up being a payment balance in the future adjustments. TransferMate maintains a complete record of the transaction, which connects the payer and their banking details to a student account line item. This is a much more challenging process for direct payments, even domestically, where there's often not an easily accessible point to point record, or the process of return is very manual. I'm thinking of check payments in particular, which are often sent from corporate bill payment servicers or with little or no origination details about the specific individual who authorized that payment.

Yeah, that can be tricky, for sure. A lot a lot heavy lifting and work and not very automated.

Usually a lot of phone calls and emails and taking the response, and just acting on that, basically.

This sounds so great. Was this easy to implement? So, a lot of times when there's anything that has to do with integration, technology implementation, there can sometimes be challenges. So what would your advice be? What was it like to get implemented and get started?

Well, first of all, I'll say that the initial setup with TransferMate for us happened 11 years ago. But if memory serves, I think that was completed in less than three weeks. The biggest source of time really came from internal discussions, as we figured out which bank account to use, worked with our bank to establish withdrawal controls, and for payment returns, there was no implementation fee, and the service operates without cost to Tulane. As for our more recent integration with TouchNet, I was basically able to simply turn the integration on by email request to TouchNetÕs customer support. After configuring a payment detail code in the portal, it was that easy.

That's great. So it sounds like now's the time. Well, Mike, you've already had so much great information to share with us. But do you have any last minute advice? I'm sure a lot of people are listening and thinking that sounds like a great idea. Especially I think more and more international students are wanting to come to university. So what would you suggest? 

Yeah, so I've been to enough higher education conferences over the years to learn how uniquely each institution prioritizes student services and processes to fit their own populations, given budget constraints and the like. Perhaps a more universal concept is the importance of billing due dates and payment processing efficiencies. In student accounts, we don't have much say about the cost of education. But we do really focus on making the process of paying for school as easy as possible for our students and their payers. If I didn't mention before, we do use the authorized user functionality in TouchNet, we have a high rate of adoption among our students. So the same cross border payment options that are presented to students are also accessible to their authorized users. And we see a lot of activity there. It's a no cost solution, improves your international student experience and decreases the volume of manual work that comes from cross border exception handling, definitely highly recommended.

Yeah, again, it seems like why would you not do that? Very good advice there, Mike. Well, thank you so much for spending some time talking with me today, it's really helpful to hear firsthand benefits from an institution that supports such a large international population.

Yeah, thanks for having me.

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