[Video Testimonial] Manchester Met University

Video Transcript

Paul Sheil, Head of Finance Service Center, Manchester Metropolitan University
Hello, my name is Paul Sheil, Head of Finance Service Center Team. My team supports around about 43,000 students, staff, external organizations, third-party contractors on a whole range of financial matters.

What's special about MMU is that we are focused solely on the student experience. Made up of the population is 28,000 undergraduate students, around about 9,000 postgraduate students. But I think over the last few years, the university's changed direction, as many universities have had to do. We're in a very competitive world. We're competing with universities that are on the same road as ourselves, so we have to attract individuals by offering the best of everything that we do.

Melanie Peters, Finance Service Development Manager, Manchester Metropolitan University
We've had an online store at Manchester Met for several years, and whilst it was functional, it was starting to look really dated, and we wanted the storefront to be representative of our organization and appear modern, welcoming, dynamic, easy to check out. Flywire, within six months, the store is so much better than what it was before.

Paul Sheil
Before 2015, we had a very fragmented payment environment. I remember when I first joined the university, we used to have students queuing up with bags of cash at the beginning of term, making cash payments to us. We regularly received bank payments from over abroad a couple of hundred pounds short because they touched multiple bank accounts on the way to the UK.
So once we appointed Flywire in 2015, that journey changed.

Geoff Maddocks, Finance Project Manager, Manchester Metropolitan University
From our point of view, sitting down with Flywire, they understood our ask, and it was then, say, well, how do we do this? How do we actually make sure that we keep our current students on our old payment partners working, paying, and being happy, as well as moving everything over to the new infrastructure?

Paul Sheil
The issues at the time were excessive. We called it a payment transformation project at the time, but that also required strength internally to support us, but it also required us to have a partner that was prepared to reinvent the way the UK education market actually operated.

If you think about what that means in practice, for us to engage with Amex, PayPal, Alipay, UnionPay, we'd have to engage with each of those partners ourselves. That's totally impractical for an organization that processes £360 million of income each year, so we wanted a partner that would enable us to do that. Flywire were able to support us, and then they worked hand in hand with us throughout the whole process. They've met with us, sometimes daily. We've had access to their developers to model a new payment environment.

85% of payers now engage directly with the university's new online payment portal through Flywire, and that compares to around about 50% in prior years. We've taken more income in the first six months of the Flywire integration through the e-store than in any maximum twelve-month period ever.

Melanie Peters
Students are getting an overall enhanced payment experience with more choice. Flywire has been absolutely instrumental, helping us realize our vision, and it's been a true partnership.

Paul Sheil
Flywire were the only payment partner that was able to offer everything that we wanted. Flywire were ahead massively in terms of the process.