Waseda Shibuya Senior High School in Singapore (WSS) is dedicated to forming its students into outstanding global citizens by building their independence, integrity, and outlook.
WSS was founded in April 1991 on the west coast of Singapore. The school provides a Japanese educational environment for Japanese residents of Singapore and other neighboring countries. In this new age of globalization and multi-national cooperation, the number of Japanese living overseas has increased. These expatriate families have struggled with the lack of Japanese senior high school options abroad. WSS was founded in order to meet their educational needs. Due to globalization, particularly the recent surge by Asian countries, Japan must collaborate with their neighbors by conducting international exchanges and exhibiting inter-cultural understanding. WSS believes this is extremely significant given the history of the region.
While WSS had been able to time and again demonstrate their ability to nurture students’ growth, the staff’s peace of mind was offset by the consistently frustrating international payments experience.
The challenge
One of the biggest challenges the school faced when it came to international education payments was receiving them in a timely manner. Because many of the payers, who were generally the students’ parents, were geographically spread out, it was difficult to ensure the payments would arrive before their due dates. The payers also found fluctuating exchange rates to be a major challenge during the payments process because the rates could drastically affect the total sum owed.
According to Hirohisa Yamazaki, Assistant Director at Waseda Shibuya, the school had to limit its credit card payments to transactions of 500 SGD or more. At 3.5%, the charge rate for the cards were too high to use for smaller sums. Additionally, disbursements of the funds were slow, with the school often not receiving a payment until six months or more after the transaction was made.
The solution
Although the staff was frustrated with the existing payment experience, they were not actively looking to introduce a new solution. Luckily, a Flywire business development manager reached out to Waseda Shibuya.
Mr. Yamazaki—whose work in the school’s administration office involves monitoring students’ payment transactions and candidates’ payment activities from a financial point of view—felt it was important to students that a new payment solution be reliable, secure, user-friendly, and fast. When it came to the school’s needs, the price point, ease of use, and ability to efficiently and effortlessly manage payments were all top priorities.
Despite the school not previously having heard of Flywire, they were impressed by Flywire’s presentation. And the fact that the payment processing was faster than their existing experience, as well as more cost effective, made the choice to go with Flywire easy.
After Flywire and the school met to kick off the project for setting up the new solution, the implementation process began. The dedicated Flywire team created the school’s payment platform and made it available on their website, with the entire process taking only a few weeks. “An account officer and office staff were involved, but no technical difficulties were experienced,” said Mr. Yamazaki. “We felt the process was very easy, from setup to launch.”
The Flywire solution was simply understandable. It made us decide to replace our old system.
Results
Since implementing Flywire’s international payment solution, Waseda Shibuya has seen real improvements in the overall cross-border payment process. The Flywire payment experience and dashboard have introduced efficiencies into the payment process and provided convenient, familiar payment options. This, in turn, saved payers time and stress.
For the school staff, the best part of the Flywire solution is how user-friendly the dashboard is. The staff is never left wondering where funds are within the payment process because payments are now easy to track from start to finish.
