Infinite Campus is an enterprise software technology company dedicated to providing fully integrated Student Information Solutions (SIS) to the K-12 education space. They have been building and delivering innovative SIS technology to their customers, including school districts, regional consortia, state departments of education and the federal government, for over 25 years.
As of today, Infinite Campus has successfully implemented its solutions for over 2,000 customers in K-12 education of all sizes, from those with fewer than 100 students to those with more than 600,000 students and they manage nearly 8 million students in 45 states.
The journey to payments for Infinite Campus began about 12 years ago when they started allowing school districts to collect money for fees such as parking. This evolved into food services sales, school store and public store sales and eventually registration and payments capabilities for activities and athletics.
Infinite Campus has worked with their customers to streamline the process of administration, registration and costs, but customers have traditionally had to vet and select many different vendors to accomplish all of the payment related functions a school requires.
In an interview with David Van Meter, Chief Product Officer of Infinite Campus, he explained how their objective was to replace those third-party systems along with the added costs of managing and administering them.
One of our hallmarks at Infinite Campus is providing a fully integrated and consistent user experience. Payments follows that principal in that all the functions we provide are built on the same technology, database and user interface for consistency.David Van Meter Chief Product Officer, Infinite Campus
Seeking greater control and efficiency
The provider Infinite Campus had been partnered with was no longer the solution they sought out due to several mergers and acquisitions, paired with the high-growth pace of Infinite Campus. From a business and technology standpoint, the Infinite Campus team knew they had to move on from their legacy vendor.
And so the journey to find an embedded payments partner began…
Like many other SaaS companies out there, Infinite Campus does not claim to be payment experts, so they decided to hire an outside consultant to help with the process and prepare documents that included all their needs and many of their wants. This list included competitive pricing, automation, reporting, white-labeling, speed of boarding and controlling the user experience.
We needed a solid and current technology foundation. In our partner, we wanted them to be big enough to have broad experience but not so big that we got lost in the shuffle.David Van Meter Chief Product Officer, Infinite Campus
A team from Infinite Campus, including David, selected four potential partners and moved into a detailed evaluation in several categories:
- Technology
- Partnership
- Stability
- Market and Solutions
- Support and Integration
- Vision
- Cost and Pricing
According to David, Payrix was a breath of fresh air because of the consultative approach from the start. He explained that Payrix was clear, upfront and transparent if things would be different or potentially on a roadmap yet to be built, which addressed many of the concerns they’d been facing.
They were looking for a payments partner that was aligned on technology, flexibility, long-term opportunity and a customer-first mentality, which ultimately would result in customers more broadly adopting tools they’d provide and reduce what is already a low turnover rate.
A payment solution in a class of its own
For Infinite Campus, payments were a small but growing portion of their business that came with their own set of challenges. One, in particular, was the time it took to board new customers. They’d tried for years to improve this from the month-long average with their prior vendor, but it wasn’t possible and it was clear that the advanced, automated system that Payrix had in place would significantly improve this.
Since partnering with Payrix, both Infinite Campus and their customers have benefitted from the automation and speed of the boarding process.
We moved from the 31-day average with our previous vendor to under 3 days on average to board with Payrix.David Van Meter Chief Product Officer, Infinite Campus
David added that Payrix enabled them to use consistent terminology across their platform, which reduced confusion and made the customer experience much simpler and more cohesive. He explained that schools don’t think like businesses and they have different goals, so having clear and understandable terminology in customer-facing content is critical to customer satisfaction.
The ability to completely white-label the technology has allowed Infinite Campus to be the “single face” and primary point-of-contact for their customers and further focus on creating a cohesive experience. This includes support, merchant agreements, pricing, boarding and payments data, including deposits being readily available in the Infinite Campus database rather than two systems or a third-party vendor database.
Not only has the partnership with Payrix made the lives of Infinite Campus customers easier, but being able to leverage all the features and functions of the platform has made their growing payments business flourish. Best of all, the relationship with Payrix has allowed the Infinite Campus team to focus on continued business growth, providing seamless customer experiences and enabling success for their beloved K-12 education customers.
