Bob Butler
Hi, everyone. Welcome to PayFAQ the embedded payments podcast brought to you by Payrix. I’m your host, Bob Butler. And today I’m going to be talking with David Van Meter, Chief Product Officer for Infinite Campus, about the payment solution they rolled out to their K-12 school customers and the benefit they’ve seen from using it. So hi, David, welcome to the show.
David Van Meter
Hi, Bob. Thanks. It’s great to be here.
Bob Butler
Hey, Dave, can you tell the audience a little bit about yourself and your experience and a lot about Infinite Campus itself?
David Van Meter
Sure. So I’m a math computer science guy by trade, got into enterprise software development and implementation in my early years, and have a lot of services background, software implementation in addition to development. I’ve been with Infinite Campus for just over 20 years now. After coming out of the commercial ERP space, we wanted to bring the benefits of what we see in technology to K-12. Infinite Campus was founded a little over a quarter century ago, we manage student data for over 8 million students in 45 states across the country, strictly US based. We have about 2000 school districts in those 45 states that use our product. We also have five State Departments of Education that license our software for districts in their states. Our headquarters are in Blaine, Minnesota, which is where I’m talking to you from today. We’re founded by our CEO and Founder, Charlie Kratsch. And we’ve been delivering solutions and integrated systems to our K-12 school districts for all those years. And my role at Infinite Campus has evolved over that time. When I started, we were seven employees, and now at 500 employees. So that’s a little bit of background.
Bob Butler
Interesting. Well as for payments, how are they integrated into the Infinite Campus ecosystem? And can you describe a few use cases?
David Van Meter
Yeah, sure. The group that I manage today is called Premium Suites. And what we do is we develop additional products that essentially displace other third-party systems out there. Payments was a system that we developed beginning about 12 or 13 years ago. And we started out small, I mean, we started out by being able to allow school districts to collect fees for things like parking, or lab/course fees. Essentially, a fairly generic way for school districts to be able to collect the fees that they needed to collect. We evolved into food service accounts so we have a full point of sale offering for school districts. And as part of that, parents being able to fund their students lunch accounts. And we’ve evolved in the last couple of years to add in a full-service school store, as well as a public store so that the school districts can offer anybody essentially in their communities, any kind of services or products that they want to provide.
Then we most recently introduced activity registration. So think about registering for football, or volleyball, or baseball, or chess club. There’s all sorts of forms associated with it. But there’s always also some sort of payment linkage to that. And just to give you a sense, our customers have traditionally had to go out and source many different vendors to be able to do essentially each of those things. And so our objective has been to connect the dots for our customers so that they don’t have to go to 5, 6, 7 different vendors to be able to kind of provide this experience to their parents, and provide that in a way that is uniform for those parents so that they don’t have to remember 5, 6, 7 different sets of user credentials and whatnot, and put their payments information into a bunch of different systems. So that’s kind of how payments fits into the campus ecosystem.
Bob Butler
I love the way that you view that from the user experience point of view. So what led to that decision to move to Payrix? And what specifically did we offer that maybe others didn’t that was attractive to you?
David Van Meter
That’s an interesting story. The vendor that we had been using, we had started with several years ago, obviously, and they were kind of a mom and pop PayFac® back in the day, focused in a vertical that we didn’t service. And it was a really good relationship, but ended up being acquired and then merged and had several changes to the organization. And it ended up being a very different experience for us towards the end. At that point, we decided we needed to go out and search for a new partner. And we started with a list of things that we thought were important based on our previous experience and kind of where we were.
First and foremost, we are a technology company, we are a high-tech company. And we expect our partners to be high-tech companies as well. And so we needed a solid and current technology foundation in our partner. We needed them to be big enough to have broad experience, but not so big that we got lost in the shuffle. One of the big issues that we had with our previous vendor was they competed with us directly in the education space after several years. And so we needed to find a vendor that was agnostic to the industry that their partners were in.
And so that led us to the final item, which and these are kind of the top five, if you will, there are several others. But the white labeling, the ability to provide essentially a service to our customers that was managed by us, that the integration was managed by us. And all of the interactions with the payment aspect of our product was through Infinite Campus. That was not true of the previous solution. And so in addition, lots of different things like being able to do automation, better reporting, speed of boarding, and ultimately, in the end controlling the user experience.
Bob Butler
Yeah, I think it always gets back to that user experience. So what are some of the advantages Infinite Campus has seen? And how have your customers benefited from your specific payment solution now that it’s up and running on the Infinite Campus platform?
David Van Meter
So that’s a really good question. Our objective going into this for our customers was obviously to create a more cohesive experience for them. But I think from an Infinite Campus point of view, we’ve benefited most from the modern REST API technology that you guys use. The expectation, again, from Infinite Campus and our technology team, is we want to be able to use the latest and greatest technology, there’s a reason for that. It eliminates technical debt, it improves our ability to deliver more flexible solutions, and so that’s probably the number one thing that I would say that that Infinite Campus has benefited from.
One of the things that I’d love to talk about, because this was something that I harped on constantly with our previous solution. And that’s the speed of boarding. In our previous solution, it could take us up to a month, 30 to 31 days, on average, to get a customer boarded. And what I’ve been able to see so far as we’ve transitioned into going live with over 800 plus merchants over the past 12 months is that we’re down to about a 2 to 3 day average for boarding, which is just amazing. Something that was just unattainable before. But I also think that the education space specifically is a very unique kind of animal. They’re not your traditional businesses that you would think of as merchants. And so it’s really important that the terminology that we use with school districts meets kind of where they are, how they view themselves in the world. And so being able to customize, for example, the merchant application so that it’s language that they understand, has been important. I think all of the customer facing content that we provide, whether it be the application or inside our product is consistent. And again, user experience.
Bob Butler
So as you look at any KPIs or success metrics, are you able to share any that have actually worked for Infinite Campus? Whether it be around growth, stickiness, anything along those lines?
David Van Meter
That’s an interesting question. Again, in the education space, they don’t really think of themselves necessarily as businesses. They’re educators, they’re there to provide for the future leaders of our country. And so when we think about the ability for us as a business at Infinite Campus to, increase revenues, decrease costs, those kinds of things, we look at the last couple of years, which overlap with our implementation with Payrix. And it’s been the pandemic, right. And so we’ve all seen the churn that our school districts have faced over that two-year period of being in session, being in school, being remote, being able to do activities, not being able to do activities, canceling last minute, those kinds of things. So, from a revenue standpoint, we haven’t seen a huge uptick, but that’s not because of the technology that’s because of the world. But again, I’ll go back to that boarding, it’s the ability to board 30 days faster, essentially, than we were before is probably the biggest KPI that I would point to that’s improved for us in this time. But we’re starting to see things come back right now that we’re going from pandemic to endemic. People are starting to figure out how to work through the environment that we live in now. And we’re starting to see kids back in school, we’re starting to see activities pick back up, state tournaments, all of that kind of stuff is coming back. So I expect that a year from now we’ll be able to give you a better answer that.
Bob Butler
I appreciate that. So are there any insights, best practices/gotchas, that any newcomers to embedded payments in our audience, that you might want to share with them?
David Van Meter
You know, the most important thing I think that I can share is take the time to really explore the technology that’s available to you through the API’s. Because it’s expensive. And the ability to leave the baggage of your previous experience behind and just focus on what could be or what can be, I think you’ll have a much better experience. It took us a little bit of time to take off our, this is the way we used to do things, hat. And being a services guy and implementation guy by trade, that’s something that I always would talk to customers about. You’ve always done things the way you’ve done them, because that’s the limitation that you had in front of you, you have a different system that you’re bringing in house now. So open your mind, think about it. There are lots of features and functions embedded in the technology that can really reduce the amount of work that you have to do during integration. So take the time to leave the baggage at the door. And just remember, every platform is unique. Many of the core features are the same, but the way you get to them, particularly in the payments platform is unique and beneficial.
Bob Butler
That makes a lot of sense. So you have any final thoughts you’d like to leave with our audience? And, again, really appreciate you being here today.
David Van Meter
Yeah, thanks. The last thing I’ll just say is the payments business at Infinite Campus is a small but growing business. It’s probably 2% or 3% of our overall revenue at the moment. But it’s been growing steadily over this time. And well, the overall development organization at campuses, nearly 300 developers strong. We had two developers, a business analyst and a quality assurance professional, that did this work, did this integration work, did it reasonably rapidly. And the assistance that we got along the way from the Payrix team was great. And so I say, dive in and give it a shot.
Bob Butler
Dave, thanks so much for being on the show.
David Van Meter
My pleasure. Thanks for having me.
Bob Butler
I know we’re both big believers in sharing knowledge and experience. So again, really appreciate you joining us today. We want to be a trusted resource for software providers like Infinite Campus who are out there trying to make sense of embedded payments and PayFac® and to help get the education they need to make the business decisions their customers and investors will thank them for. Thank you for joining us today on the PayFAQ embedded payments podcast brought to you by Payrix. For more information about embedded payments, subscribe to our show at Payrix.com/podcasts.
