8/14/2008

Is that cash or credit?

CAMPUS REVIEW

Is that cash or credit?

CAMPUS REVIEW
Education institutions recruiting foreign students could potentially generate hundreds of thousands of dollars a year in additional revenue by using a different system of fees payments.

The former head of IDP's American and Canadian operations, Dr Mitch Leventhal has set up his own company to assist institutions arrange payments from foreign students. He announced last week that Mitch Leventhal Strategies had been appointed by Planet Payment as a "preferred sales agent" for the education sectors in Australia and New Zealand.

Planet Payment was a market leader in providing localised pricing solutions, including multi-currency processing and Dynamic Currency Conversion or DCC, he said.

"DCC identifies foreign-issued cards at the merchant's point-of-sale - whether in a university's fee collection office, the campus bookstore, or on a website - and converts the transaction from the institution's currency into the cardholder's home currency, in real-time," Leventhal said.

"The cardholder (a student or parent) gets the benefit of paying in his home currency at a final price that is generally less than or equivalent to that which would otherwise have been charged by his credit card provider - and with no surprise conversion rates when the credit card bill finally arrives."

He said that using DCC, institutions could earn as much as 1 per cent of the face amount of their existing transactions as additional profit. In recent years, international education providers had encouraged international students to pay tuition fees via credit card and more than half Australian universities now preferred this system.

The main reasons were the immediacy of payment and the clear audit trail this provided - which were lacking when students used traditional bank drafts to make payments.