Making fee payments easier for international students
At a glance
Flywire were looking to understand the experiences of international students paying for their tuition fees to UK universities. This insight would help them to enhance the payment service they offer. By engaging IFF, Flywire received first hand insight into students’ payment journeys along with a series of recommendations around how students could be better informed and supported along the way.
About the client
Flywire has been solving complex payment problems for students and education institutions since 2011. Flywire connects millions of students with thousands of institutions and hundreds of education agents to improve the payment experience worldwide.
Challenges and objectives
As Flywire is a key service provider to students across the globe, their main research need was understanding and accommodating the different payment set-ups and options available to students in different markets. By getting the right insight, Flywire would be able to identify improvements that were applicable and beneficial to all users.
Flywire wanted to understand the payment experience of students across a range of markets, any barriers they faced when making payments, the support they sought, and to establish what would make the payment journey easier in the future.
Solution
The study was conducted across two consecutive waves; each wave collected insight via a mixed methods approach:
1.) an online survey of international students from a pre-selected list of UK universities to understand the experiences of students at scale. Earlier iterations of the survey had been conducted by another research agency and so Flywire required us to build further on the existing question set, while still allowing for comparisons to be drawn with previous data
2.) a mix of on-campus and online focus groups with international students to explore some of the key issues raised in the online survey in much greater depth.
A key insight need for Flywire was to understand the distinct issues faced by Nigerian students when making payments internationally from Nigeria. This meant that in the first wave of the research supplementary focus groups were conducted specifically with Nigerian students.
Impact
As part of the reporting outputs, Flywire received several case studies which encapsulated the payment journeys for different students from different countries, who paid for their fees in different ways. The purpose of these case studies was to capture real life student accounts which demonstrated how varied the payment journey could be.
As a result of the research, Flywire also received a series of recommendations structured around the key milestones of the payment journey. These focussed on the support that Flywire could lend universities particularly around language and timings of communications on payments.