[Case Study] How the University of Waikato doubled international enrolment with Flywire

For international students who want to study in New Zealand, a tuition fee payment is more than a transaction—it is a visa-critical milestone. For the University of Waikato, Flywire helped to turn a high-stakes bottleneck into a competitive advantage, helping to double international enrollment in just 24 months.

To apply for a visa, international students must provide evidence that their tuition fees have been paid, in full. Crucially, University of Waikato students experienced a significant wait to receive a receipt after making a payment, which was a consequence of a highly manual and time-consuming payment and reconciliation process. Students could not submit their visa applications until the receipt was issued. The delay directly caused unnecessary anxiety and threatened their enrolment timeline.

By partnering with Flywire, University of Waikato has solved this critical pinch point. The result is a secure, transparent and efficient payment experience that has improved the student experience and driven growth. 

The problem: 

Before Flywire, the University of Waikato offered students the option to pay their tuition fees by direct bank transfer or via another payment provider. Both options resulted in an outdated payment experience that created a major bottleneck and impacted both the student journey and staff efficiency. The critical challenges were:

• Lack of transparency: Neitherstudents nor parents had visibility into the payment status, resulting in anxiety and constant follow-up calls to the University. Waikato’s international team was unable to answer time-sensitive queries because they couldn’t see the payments either. Instead, they had to wait on finance for updates and confirmation.
• Manual, time-consuming reconciliation: The finance team had to manually identify and cross-check payments before they could be reconciled. This was time-consuming because payments commonly arrived with incorrect or missing references, or were short because of unexpected fees or currency conversion fluctuations.
• Delays to visa applications: No payment receipt can be issued until funds are identified, reconciled, and posted to the student's account. This directly impacted how quickly students could apply for their visa and time-to-enrolment timescales.

For staff, Flywire helps convert students as swiftly as possible by delivering: 

• Real-time visibility across teams: Flywire’s Dashboard provides complete transparency of incoming payments, which means the international team can now answer any time-sensitive payment queries themselves.
• Streamlined, automated reconciliation: Flywire requires a reference be entered for all payments, making it easy to identify incoming payments, simplifying and automating reconciliation to the student account.
• Time & cost savings: The volume of inbound payment-related enquiries and receipt requests has decreased substantially thanks to Flywire’s payment status updates and self-service portal. Now, the finance and international teams have more time for more strategic work. The University also saves a significant sum in merchant and bank fees each year.

The University of Waikato actively promotes Flywire as the preferred way to pay throughout its entire ecosystem—on their website, in automated student communications, and within training for education agents and recruitment partners. In doing so, the University aims to rapidly consolidate all international payments through Flywire to deliver further efficiencies and improve the student experience across the board.