Every year, the Red Deer Public School District welcomes more than 140 international K-12 students, with the majority between the ages of 15 and 18, to the Albertan city sandwiched in the prairies between Calgary and Edmonton in Canada. Lots of people are involved in making sure these students have positive life-changing experiences – their families, education agents, homestay families and, of course, the small International Education team managing all of it at Red Deer.
All of those parties count on reliable, secure payment processes in pursuit of their collective goal of student success. Families need a transparent and convenient tuition payment experience to enroll their students with ease. Homestay families need to receive timely stipends in order to host students. Maintaining good relationships with education agents helps Red Deer sustain a strong pipeline of students.
In 2018, Red Deer decided to begin a domestic and international payments modernization project with Flywire to better serve families, agents and homestay partners. It has since improved important payment experiences and shaved weeks of previously manual work off the team’s remit that they can now spend on what they do best – ensuring life-changing experiences for international students.
About Red Deer Public School District
Satisfaction with streamlining international tuition payments builds momentum for more change and innovation
Red Deer Public Schools first implemented Flywire for international tuition payment processing in 2018. The results of families being able to pay tuition expenses in their preferred currency and see all fees up front, while the school received full payment in Canadian dollars, were immediate. Benefits went beyond convenience, ease and high payment security. As one example, the team recalls handling a phone call from a parent panicked about whether their payment would get there in time to secure a study permit.
After seeing the payment status as “guaranteed” in the Flywire Dashboard, Lisa Loeppky, International Education Coordinator, was able to easily send the receipt needed to secure the permit.
“They could apply for their study permit, and the student was able to get to Canada on time,” Loeppky said. “That’s the flexibility with Flywire.”
Next stop: Automating outgoing payments for agents, homestay partners
With international tuition payment processes running so smoothly, the team looked to other areas of payment inefficiencies that Flywire could help solve. They zeroed in on how they sent monthly stipends in CAD to homestay families and sent commission payments to agents, whom they partner with to secure student placements.
Prior to Flywire, agent commission payments were almost exclusively paid out by wire transfer, which added extra fees and required a lot of manual work. Separately, more than 100 homestay payments needed to be paid out by cheque every month. Queuing them up required manual reporting, data-(re)entry into another system and swapping information between the international office and accounting.
In both cases, the international team had no visibility into when payments were dispatched and when they would arrive. When there was a more complex scenario – say, a split commission payment or a family who was a few days short of an expected homestay payment – it was difficult and time-consuming to solve.
Flywire provides one stop for all payments connected to international students
The team implemented Flywire for outgoing payments – both international and domestic – in November 2024. The ROI of having all incoming and outgoing payments related to international students running on Flywire was nearly immediate. This innovation spanned faster payments, better visibility into payment status, and greater time savings for the team, resulting in higher satisfaction from students, homestay families, agents and staff.
- Less manual processing of incoming wire payments. All international students must pay their tuition through Flywire, which is integrated with Red Deer’s student information system, TRUE North. Because families can pay via wire transfer through the Flywire payment platform, the team immediately knows who the fees will be applied to. This makes it much easier to reconcile and apply payments to the right account in TRUE North, saving weeks spent manually matching unnamed bank wire payments to student accounts.
- Less manual work for outgoing payments. The Red Deer team downloads a file from TRUE North that makes it easy to upload accurate payment information into Flywire. This saves weeks previously spent manually inputting beneficiary information and verifying its accuracy for homestay families and agents.
- Faster, flexible payments. Homestay families receive payments directly in their bank account via EFT in 24 hours or less. If a homestay family is short a few days of payment due, it is easy to send partial payments via the Flywire platform. Additionally, payments settle in agent bank accounts in their currency of choice.
- Flexibility for special payments. When a student’s family needs to make payments for field trips or other special events, they can easily pay in their local currency through Flywire.
- Local, multilingual support. Everyone can access Flywire support around the clock in their native language and local time zone when they have payment questions or issues, reducing the time staff needs to address concerns.
- Better payment visibility.The Flywire Dashboard makes it easy to see the status of every payment connected to an international student.