Flywire Debuts Solution to Streamline UK Student Loan Payments

Flywire has introduced enhancements to its Student Financial Software solution aimed at the U.K. market.

The new offerings, announced by the payments company Wednesday (Sept. 17), include the solution’s first implementations featuring real-time student account presentment for British customers, which is then linked to Flywire payment capabilities.

“Currently, many higher education institutions in the U.K. lack a unified student portal offering,” the company said. “The payer and administrative experiences are often disparate and frustrating for payers and manual and time-consuming for administrators.”

The company says this solution addresses these problems via a full service student account portal that sits on top of a school’s receivable system, offering self-service functionality.

This includes real-time views of account details in real time, and the ability to make one time and enroll in payment plans.

Also on Wednesday, the company introduced an enhanced solution for managing loans from the U.S. government and other, third-party alternative sources for students studying in the U.K. This solution is designed to address the “very manual process” financial institutions in the U.K. have for receiving U.S. loan payments from third-party funding sources.

“Flywire’s updated solution solves these problems by providing beneficiary management, loan disbursement processing, foreign exchange calculation, and incoming and outgoing payment processing, all within a single platform,” the company said.

PYMNTS spoke earlier this week with Ryan Frere, executive vice president and general manager B2B at Flywire, and Chris Couch, head of product B2B at Flywire, to examine the way artificial intelligence (AI) orchestration, embedded payments and human oversight are transforming the world of receivables.

“AI is an inflection point in technology, kind of like the internet was; maybe like the iPhone was … and not being involved in it is going to leave you behind,” Couch said.

While financial professionals have spent the past year and a half vacillating between excitement and caution on generative AI, there’s been a growing movement toward pilots and production use, that report added.

“What companies are starting to see is, hey, there are real applications where AI can help. It can help us be more efficient … reduce cost … maybe get paid faster … Instead of exploring it now, we’re going to start rolling out a few things,” Frere said.

The subtext here, that report said, is that finance leaders don’t require a grand theory of everything AI, but rather need focused use cases with measurable outcomes.