All eightQuestion 03 of 08Payments and tuition plans
How do you make complex payments manageable for everyone?
Full Fabric
Stripe and Flywire
Stripe and Flywire integrations and tuition payment plans inside an enterprise admissions platform: checkout, instalments, recurring payments, refunds and reconciliation.
What was going on?
Full Fabric is where universities run admissions and the student journey, and paying tuition is part of that journey.
Institutions support different arrangements. A student might pay upfront, through scheduled instalments, or through automatic recurring payments. Behind every one of them, a finance team needs to know what is outstanding, what has been paid and what was refunded.
Why was it hard?
Connecting a payment provider is only one part of the problem. The product also has to represent the correct financial state across students, payments, schedules and the administrative workflows built on them.
Providers report changes through webhooks: a payment that succeeds, fails, is refunded or arrives late. The platform's record of what a student owes has to stay in step with what the provider actually processed.
What was mine?
- Led
- Product direction for the Stripe and Flywire integrations and for tuition payment plans.
- Specified
- Checkout, payment plans with scheduled instalments, and automatic recurring payments through provider subscriptions.
- Specified
- Webhook handling, payment-status synchronization, refunds and reconciliation.
- Collaborated
- Technical scoping and delivery with engineering.
What shipped?
Students can pay tuition through Stripe or Flywire, upfront or through a payment plan.
Payment plans support scheduled instalments and automatic recurring payments.
Payment status, refunds and reconciliation stay in step between the provider and the platform.
What did I learn?
Processing a transaction and delivering a reliable financial workflow are different problems. The first is an integration. The second is a product: a student and a finance officer need the same answer to one question, what has been paid?