Student Global Payment System

The vendor is required to provide student global payments system (SGPS) project aims to enhance the university of student experience through payment processing by implementing an integrated, efficient solution.
- This project will provide faster, more reliable, and transparent payment and refund options, enhancing the student financial experience with a more intuitive and accessible platform.
- It will also streamline payments, refunds, and reconciliation while reducing manual processing for greater operational efficiency.
- Some of the high-level requirements are listed below:
(a) Student experience
• The proponent provides effective, best-practice student communications.
• Students are updated securely on the status on their financial transactions.
• The student’s PeopleSoft student center is updated in real-time, offering up-to-date status on payments, refunds, and payouts
• The proponent’s student interface is user-friendly, allowing students to manage payments, refunds, and payouts easily, without requiring end-user training.
• The proponent provides an end-to-end sample workflow that illustrates how both domestic and international payments, refunds, and payouts are handled
• The proponent offers robust student customer support escalation procedures
(b) Payment
• The integrated solution enables faster processing times for domestic and international students.
• The integrated payment solution must support various digital payment methods for both domestic and international students.
• The integrated solution must have the capability to:
o Pre-populate specified payment amount.
o Prevent over-payment.
• The system supports sanctions against specified countries, and assist students from sanctioned
countries with fee payments.
• The system automatically posts payments payment posting to the student account in PeopleSoft and
provide real-time updates on the PeopleSoft student portal upon fund verification and guarantee.
• Third-party payor proxy.
• The vendor manages disputes related to chargebacks.
(c) Refund and payout
• The integrated system supports faster refund processing for domestic and international students, or
their financial supporters without a processing fee.
• Refund processing supports any of the following:
o To student regardless of original source
o To original source of payment
o To country or origin
o Of payments not processed through your system
• Refund approval workflow
• Individual or scheduled batch e-transfer payouts.
• System supports monthly reconciliation of negative daily balance.
• The system has the ability to restrict award payouts as e-transfer as cad and country bank account only.
(d) Cost
• Student benefits from:
o Full transparency of all costs and fees
o Exchange rate cost savings
o Hold quoted rates for international student.
(e) Reconciliation process and automation
• Payment system is integrated with university bank account and automates reconciliation in Realtime or near-real-time for payments, and refunds. the system has automated notification, reporting, error handling, backup files, and audit trail.
(f) Integration
• PeopleSoft student portal integration as either embedded vendor portal or as external link.
• System supports ability to apply university-approved branding
• Cloud based (software as a service) solution reference architecture required.
• Future consideration vendor system integration opportunities:
o Modern campus destiny one
o Residence stares
o Slate
(g) Testing and quality assurance
• Vendor offers at no cost:
o Environment lifecycle for dev, test, production
o Test credit cards and bank accounts for both domestic and international
o Test cases for functional and user acceptance testing
• The system operates effectively under expected performance load.
(h) Compliance
• The system’s fraud prevention strategies, methods, and practices are designed to detect, prevent, and mitigate fraudulent activities.
• the system has process, messaging, and support for blocking and unblocking fraudulent users.
(i) Implementation and support
• Legal and contractual terms for managing and notifying university of security breaches, downtime, or non-compliance, communication and alerts
• Post-go-live, the vendor must provide defined SLA response timelines for handling configurations and customizations.
- Current environment
• Processing delays:
o Domestic payments: 2-5 days; international payments: 2-10 days to process, leading to late interest fees, blocked registration, and restricted access to services for students.
o Limited transparency and tracking for students create uncertainty and increased inquires.
o Refunds to international student bank accounts can take several weeks, creating significant delays and dissatisfaction.
o Payouts for awards, scholarships, bursaries, excess on account, and emergency student funding are tied to payroll cycles (2-4 weeks), delaying disbursement and affecting students in urgent financial need.
• Residence payment issues:
o Students must create a separate payee for residence payments which causes many errors
o Misallocated payments require manual intervention through finance (student receivables) service requests to trace, delaying fund transfers and in some cases leading to eviction warnings due to delay in transferring funds from academic accounts to residence.
• Operational challenges:
o A high volume of unallocated payments requires manual intervention by finance that must be initiated by students or their financial supporters contributing to a growing unallocated fund balance and additional workload for finance staff.
o inefficient refund workflows require manual interventions, with over 3,000 refunds processed annually.
o This involves issuing manual cheques and handling hundreds of refund issue service requests.
o More than 6,000 annual inquiries to enrolment services stem from payment related issues, increasing
administrative burden and impacting service to students.
o Student survey feedback on payment satisfaction identified the need for streamlined student payment and refund processes, real-time tracking within the PeopleSoft student center, faster deposit times to bank accounts or student center accounts and reduced administrative steps to improve overall efficiency and accessibility.
- Current volume
• International payments - exchange rates apply (not including credit card) - $ 51.6 m
• Domestic and international student credit card payments - $ 21.2 m
• International student refunds - exchange rates apply - $ 1.7 m.
- Contract Period/Term: 2 years
- Questions/Inquires Deadline: April 11, 2025