Website Content PAN Attack
March 1, 2019
WPS Launches STEP to make campus transactions easier
December 22, 2020
Our Mission
Our mission is for students to have greater access to Higher Education and help make it affordable and convenient. We also believe technology is going to help us get there, making it easier for campus staff to be more effective and efficient.
Many campus leaders, and their technology partners, work hard to offer convenient ways to get goods like course materials, supplies, and food – especially for those eligible for support and financial aid. However, behind the scenes, it’s common to hear of staff who handle those transactions using manual or partly automated processes, which is a hassle. Others are stretched to their limit – bogged down by inefficiency.
Watchman powers solutions that eliminate those hassles while ensuring compliance with all campus and regulatory requirements. This improves the campus experience, strengthens institutions, supports vendors, and leads to greater student success.
Beginnings and key milestones
The foundation for Watchman Payment Systems started in early 2016 when a group of former business partners who had worked together in a point-of-sale business decided to build something innovative and different that could benefit a broader range of colleges and students. We saw a significant hole in student payments, and we quickly found ourselves immersed in the world of campus transactions.
We noticed the challenges brought on by even the simplest-sounding transactions. If a student could not pay out-of-pocket, purchases could become complex and problematic. Sometimes going out of pocket wasn’t an option, especially for expensive items like course materials. Good solutions existed, both campus-built and from software suppliers, but coverage was often patchwork and the solutions were often semi-manual workarounds that were limited in scope.
Our goal became to fill these holes and give students and staff a simple, hassle-free way to handle ALL purchases made with student funds. We wanted to make the experience as painless as possible for everyone in the transaction flow.
Milestones
Some of our milestones include:
- Starting in 2017, WPS worked to deliver enterprise-level services to campuses which allow Financial Aid to be used at the campus store for eligible purchases. Along with our partners, we helped build a world-class FA payments service.
- Sponsored Account Payments, sometimes known as third-party payments, were an important piece of the puzzle. We learned that, on many campuses, colleges leaned heavily on the campus store to administer significant amounts of critical aid – including for Veterans, athletic groups and local scholarships. The processes to manage these sources of aid were inefficient and tedious to manage, at best, often requiring students to gather and bring supporting documentation and to wait in (long) dedicated lines with specially-trained cashier staff. We built our Sponsored Accounts Module (SAM) – providing a better way to tie Financial Aid and Sponsored Account funds together with highly configurable software that lets students access that aid at any register using just their student ID.
- At the same time, we found ourselves connecting with a wave of innovators introducing new services and point of sale (PoS) systems to campus stores. We built a full suite of payment integrations for campus sellers for handling credit cards, store credit, sales taxes, EBT payments, and gift cards – to help campus stores meet the tricky payment requirements of a modern campus retailing environment.
- Throughout, one thing became clear: Higher Education is challenging itself to become more accessible and affordable. Watchman is playing a role in helping campuses meet this challenge efficiently and affordably.
- In 2020 Watchman became a preferred digital partner with Verba VitalSource, helping our mutual customers fully automate the inclusive access billing process to help colleges bring inclusive access benefits to more students.
STEP
Through this experience, we have created the most comprehensive, robust Student Educational Payments platform in the industry. We call it STEP. STEP enables educational institutions to provide low-cost, highly accessible course materials to students – without increasing the burden on staff in the campus store, IT, Business Office, Bursar Office, or Financial Aid office. STEP meets the highest standards for data security. It powers all the services we offer, from IA Billing, to AR Services, to building better interfaces to support Food Insecurity – and whatever problem we solve next.
Learn More
We’re rolling out more information every day about our services and solutions here. If you have questions about information we haven’t added, yet, or you want to talk to us directly, Please reach out to us at info@watchmanpaymentsystems.com for more information. Additionally, please watch this space – there is more information and more announcements coming soon.
