Before 2016, Monmouth University had several vendors helping it collect money and send money back. Bills, payment plans, online sales, refunds: each had its own arrangements. Then the refund provider told the university it could no longer process student refunds under new federal cash management regulations. One piece of the machinery had stopped fitting. The university could replace that piece. Or it could reconsider the machine.
- TouchNet connects college payments, account records, and campus credentials.
- Its advantage is the work surrounding a transaction: posting, permissions, reconciliation, and support.
- Customer results depend on process changes. A new portal alone cannot do the whole job.
Monmouth invited three vendors to demonstrate their systems and brought representatives from across the campus into the decision. The aim had expanded from replacing a refund service to finding a partner for the business office. TouchNet won the campus questionnaires. Its relationship with Ellucian, whose Colleague system Monmouth already used, helped turn the selection into a connected billing and payment operation.
The refund that changed the brief
There is a familiar way to describe a payments company: it helps someone pay. TouchNet’s story becomes more interesting if you start with what happens afterward. The college must know whose account to update, which department earned the revenue, whether a refund is due, and how the transaction relates to the money arriving at the bank.
These are different views of the same event. A student wants confirmation. A bursar wants an accurate balance. An accountant wants records that agree. A payment can satisfy the first person and leave the other two with an afternoon’s work. That gap is the company’s territory.
The distinction matters because the visible checkout screen is only a small part of campus commerce. A university also sells event registrations, operates dining services, collects departmental payments, and deals with people paying on somebody else’s behalf. The administrative pleasure of having these arrangements connected is admittedly difficult to put on a sweatshirt.
The payment is only the beginning
TouchNet calls its connected platform U.Commerce. Its current catalog gives that idea a practical shape. Bill+Payment provides student-account payment self-service. Marketplace lets campus entities create storefronts, registration sites, and payment pages. SponsorPoint handles third-party sponsor invoicing and payments. Merchant services and reconciliation address the journey from payment acceptance to financial records.
Conceptual illustration. The exact route depends on the institution’s products and integrations.
The buyers are institutions: finance offices, IT departments, and campus operations teams. Students and families encounter the services their college adopts. This is institutional software combined with payment services; it is also a business whose usefulness depends heavily on the systems already running inside the customer.
TouchNet’s partner network includes more than 250 certified partners and a community the company describes as more than 1,000 higher education institutions. Some partners connect payments to U.Commerce; others integrate with OneCard credentials. This network is a meaningful selling point. A department can want its own specialist application while the finance office still wants transaction records to come through a manageable channel.
Ellucian is one connection. Anthology is another: a 2022 announcement described integrations with Student, Reach, and Encompass. TransferMate supplies an international-payments connection. The proposition is that a campus can keep specialist services while reducing the administrative seams between them. Whether that works for a particular college is a question to answer with its actual systems in the room.
The business office with fewer visitors
Purdue’s published TouchNet case offers a revealing phrase. Amanda Emmons, an associate bursar, describes a “no-stop” approach. Orientation directs students to a single sign-on portal, where they can arrange authorized users, payment plans, and direct deposit for refunds.
“We really focus on a no-stop approach.”Amanda Emmons / Purdue University
The case reports 90% adoption of direct deposit for refunds and a halving of calls to the business office. The useful lesson is the choreography: introduce the process early, make the account easy to reach, and place answers where routine questions arise. The software provides a route. The university teaches people to take it.
Reported in Purdue’s published customer case. An institution-specific result.
Canisius University approached a related problem from the staff side. Its Student Account Advisor implementation brings student information into a permission-controlled view. The published account describes use in the student records and financial services office, then expansion into other support settings. Staff training and identifying offices with frequent student contact were part of the work. Easier access to information has to come with deliberate decisions about who can see it.
Two hours back, and a fee that moved
Wichita State added TouchNet Merchant Services and shifted processing to Global Payments. Its case reports no setup or implementation fees for that conversion, roughly two staff hours saved daily, and about $500,000 saved in the first year after adopting PayPath. Those figures describe that institution’s experience.
The hours came from reducing bank-file handling, reconciliation, and related problems. The PayPath savings involved a different mechanism: moving credit card fees from the institution to payers. TouchNet’s product material explains that eligible payments carry a supplemental service or convenience fee. The university receives the payment without bearing that merchant expense.
These belong on separate lines of a business case. Automation can remove effort. A fee policy changes who pays. Both affect a campus budget; families experience the second directly. Anyone copying this approach should assess the payer experience alongside the institutional savings.
A student ID with a second career
OneCard gives TouchNet another place in campus life. Its cloud-based credential management synchronizes with student information systems and supports permissions for building access, dining, check-in, and declining-balance payments. Mobile ID moves credentials onto phones; the 360u app provides another access point to campus services.
A student identity can therefore sit behind several everyday interactions. The practical attraction is managing those privileges in relation to campus records. The partner directory even includes Farmer’s Fridge, a fresh-food vending business, with a OneCard Web Service integration. In this corner of enterprise software, a useful connection can end in a salad.
Toughey’s biography traces TouchNet across web, enterprise integration, mobile apps, and cloud software. Heartland bought the company for $375 million in 2014. Two years later, Global Payments acquired Heartland. The acquisition price describes the business transaction, not what a college pays for a deployment.
TouchNet also applies its payment expertise outside campus commerce. Its community program says it supplies technology for Heart to Heart International’s online giving and absorbs the card-processing fees. That is a concrete use of the same plumbing: the charity receives the full donation.
Buy the exceptions, too
The market has alternatives. Nelnet and Transact compete in tuition payments and payment plans; other education-payment providers cover overlapping needs. TouchNet’s breadth is a reason to evaluate it, but a broad catalog does not settle an individual purchase. The right comparison follows the tasks a college actually needs to complete.
A useful demonstration should include a failed payment, a refund, an authorized family user, and a departmental sale. Follow each through the student record and reporting process. Ask who handles the exception. Assign responsibility before the first transaction arrives.
Even the clock deserves attention. TouchNet’s reconciliation guidance explains that daily reports can disagree when they use different cutoff times. Florida Atlantic University’s Marketplace guidance assigns reconciliation work to departments. Connected software still needs agreed accounting practices and people to perform them.
An institution unwilling to coordinate those practices will have a harder time capturing the benefit. So will one whose required vendors or systems do not fit the proposed integrations. The transferable idea is simple enough: trace a transaction from the person paying to the person explaining it later. Make that entire journey the buying brief.
A university business office exists to help people through complicated financial moments. When routine transactions become easier to complete and explain, staff have more time for the complicated ones. That is a persuasive ambition for campus software. It also gives the buyer something concrete to look for after the demo is over.