Partner spotlight: Flywire and Xetta simplify international payments for universities across Australia and Asia Pacific, strengthening their long-standing collaborative relationship

Over 10+ years, payment powerhouses, Xetta and Flywire, have worked together to simplify cross-border payments for universities in Australia, New Zealand, and the wider Asia Pacific region.

With almost a quarter of all higher education students in Australia hailing from overseas, the country is one of the most popular international study destinations, particularly with students from South Asian countries, including China, India, and Korea. For these students, having an easy and secure way to make cross-border payments-for tuition, accommodation, and more-is critical.

Approximately 80% of Australian universities use the market-leading commerce platform Xetta to take payments from their students. However, Xetta needed a partner who specialized in cross-border payments to process tuition payments originating from overseas. That partner is Flywire.

Better together: Optimizing international payments, shaping success

Xetta always looks to leverage emerging technologies to deliver their future-focused payments, and immediately saw Flywire’s potential upon its entry into the Australian market. In 2012 Xetta and Flywire formed a strategic partnership, allowing Xetta to offer Flywire to clients as a simple, cost-effective international payment option.

When Flywire entered the Australian market, it was clear they had an international payment solution that would stand the test of time. They have proven to be a great payment option to offer our clients.

David HeffernanXetta

The global, regional, and local banking relationships within Flywire’s Global Payment Network are critical to the partnership’s success. Through this network, Flywire offers familiar, local payment options to students from over 240 countries and territories-including Alipay, WeChatPay and JCB among others-and secure transaction processing in more than 140 currencies. Students also benefit from Flywire’s transparent payment tracking and around-the-clock multilingual support. All students have to do is select Flywire as the payment method within Xetta; the rest takes care of itself.

Flywire not only delivers a superior student experience but also significant internal efficiencies. End-to-end integration with the Xetta platform means that for university finance teams, manual reconciliation is a thing of the past. At institutions where the integration is in place, for example, Curtin University, Queensland University of Technology, and the University of Sydney, when a student pays using Flywire, their payment information is automatically updated within Xetta. Xetta then passes it through to the Student Information System (SIS). The result is a significant saving in time and effort, which finance teams can better use to focus on more valuable tasks, for example, helping students with complex queries.

Developments to the integration are on schedule to be released in 2024, development which will increase efficiencies experienced by finance teams. These include real-time payment updates (currently updated by an end-of-day file) and enabling the Flywire’s refunds API to allow the initiation of Flywire refunds from the Xetta platform and provide progress updates.

Flywire’s strategic partnerships are curated to deliver the most value to institutions. They are central to the agreement. By partnering with Xetta, almost all universities across Australia have access to Flywire’s proven technology and global payments network, which delivers smooth and simple cross-border payments for international students.

Mina FakhouriVP of Sales APAC & Global Agents, Education, Flywire

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