Fractured geopolitical landscape, security fears, and visa restrictions pose challenges for both education institutions and international students. Under increased pressure to issue refunds and provide full transparency, institutional reputation is more critical than ever. You have a duty of care to refund students quickly and easily. You must deliver on your student experience goals and support students through these challenging times, while ensuring the process is efficient for your own internal resources and meets regulatory obligations.
Here are seven key steps for an efficient international student refund process.
1. Ensure the student payments refund process aligns with your existing processes and policies
Does your education institution have a policy of refunding to the originating source? Ensure your international payments provider has this capability to help streamline your education refund process. Likewise, your payments platform must have a flexible approval and review model so you can appropriately align with your institution’s internal processes.
Initiation of refunds can differ between educational institutions, with some allowing students to initiate the process and others leaving that responsibility to the institution itself. A flexible international student payments platform, such as Convera, can help your institution choose the process that fits your policies best.
2. Streamline your education refund operations
Managing refunds can be a time-consuming and resource-heavy task. To increase operational efficiencies, choose an international student payments provider that allows you to bulk upload and manage multiple payments in multiple currencies.
It’s critical for both your institution and your students to easily track the status of refunds online via a unique identifier, preferably the student’s ID number, which they will already be using for other administrative tasks. If students can monitor their refund status online in real time, you’ll receive fewer enquiries and reduce the number of tedious manual tasks.
3. Choose an international payments provider that can easily integrate with your institution’s existing system
To achieve ultimate process efficiencies, your chosen payments platform should seamlessly integrate with all your education technology providers, such as enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems, payment aggregators, student accommodation engines, and student record systems. True integration will speed up reconciliation and allow transactions to be completed within one system, helping your institution save time and expenses.
4. Help protect your students from the risk of fraud
To help protect your students from fraud, you have to ensure that when collecting beneficiary details, your institution has steps in place to stop phishers from intercepting this data. A co-branded payment platform that provides robust data validation is important, as is the ability to validate details by country, which helps get data collection right the first time around.
Your student payments provider needs a dedicated team to help protect students from fraud, as well as remediate if fraud does occur. For additional protection for students, your international payments platform should provide the option to deliver local bank account details, provide instructions in their local language, and easily track their refunds in real time. Ultimately, helping to defend students against fraudulent activity contributes to your institution’s reputation as a brand they can trust. Which leads us on to…
5. Protect your institution’s reputation
If your students fall victim to fraud when providing their bank details or if your institution becomes a victim of business email compromise (BEC), this could generate negative PR and reputational damage. To make sure this does not happen, you should employ robust data collection, data validation, and document collection processes via your student refunds payment platform.
6. Ensure your student payments provider meets regulatory and/or industry compliance standards
Both educational institutions and payment processors are subject to strict regulations and compliance standards relating to data processing and privacy protection. Your payments provider must demonstrate that it has qualified personnel and sufficient expertise and controls in place to comply with such requirements. Choose a student payments provider that can demonstrate its compliance expertise and serve as an asset in your ongoing efforts to adhere to these continuously changing rules.
7. Work with an international payments provider you can trust
Do you have proof that your partner has the size and the financial strength and stability to withstand any significant changes in the market? In times of economic instability, a payments provider’s susceptibility to market downturns could result in a loss of funds. In turn, this could impact the reputation of your institution and its ability to attract international students. It’s important to work with a provider that you can trust to deliver the speed, certainty, and service that you and your students truly deserve.
Simple refund process, stress-free students
Student experience is a key driver for your reputation, and you need to deliver a frictionless process for any type of international payments, from student aid and loans to tuition refunds. Convera can help you offer a world-class international payments experience for students, alleviate your administrative burdens, and complement your existing refund processes by streamlining payments in over 140 currencies across more than 200 countries and territories.
