Collaborative Project Between University Teams Wins Award

The University's Finance and Information Services Applications Directorate teams rebuilt and implement a new payment system, scooping an award for successful delivery of the project.

Earlier this month, the University of Edinburgh was presented with the 'Implementation Excellence' award at the Annual WPM and Flywire Conference & Awards Ceremony for its recent work to improve the process of making customer payments to the University.

This collaboration with the industry-leading payment solution provider WPM & Flywire, created new user-validated pathways, particularly for accommodation and tuition fees. Knowing the data would be pre-validated allowed standardising the output so transactions could be automatically loaded and allocated to customer accounts, greatly streamlining and reducing the manual time and effort previously required by the Finance team.

The award recognises the successful delivery of the project by several teams, including Finance Systems (particularly Accounts Receivables), ISG Applications Directorate (Integration Team, Software Development and Project Services) and the University’s business partner Inoapps, who worked collaboratively to seamlessly interface this financial data to the new People & Money System.

The University's Integration team also added an extra step to the process when creating Direct Debit and Recurring Card Payment mandates. This process involves checking a customer’s account for open invoices and automatically updating the receipt methods and associated payment instructions accordingly.

The pioneering integration work done by the People & Money programme now forms the basis for future application integration work.

The University staff were commended for their 'shining example' of implementation best practice and their ability to work collaboratively with the supplier. Overall, the project has delivered a more efficient and streamlined student payment process, which has been recognised as an excellent implementation of new technology