“We have seen a large increase in our student population over the last several years, and most of them are off-campus students,” said Melissa Peters, the school’s associate vice president of finance and budget. “This growth has caused an increase in the number of refund checks we issue, taxed our accounting personnel, and affected the customer service we provide to students. The lines to pick up checks are long and those checks mailed sometimes get lost. We also find when everybody is working on processing refunds they simply cannot be helping students.”

With Higher One’s OneDisburse Refund Management, students can choose from multiple ways to receive their refunds online. Among their options are two electronic methods for receiving their refunds: direct deposit to the OneAccount, a no minimum balance, no monthly fee, FDIC-Insured checking account provided by Higher One, or ACH to another bank account of the students’ choice.

The University’s decision to implement Higher One’s services was heavily influenced by a visit to another Higher One Client, nearby Flagler College, St. Augustine.

“We made a visit to Flagler College and looked at the system there. While at Flagler, we spent some time talking to them about the implementation process,” said Peters. “Two things were key—that Higher One provided a step-by-step process for implementation and, that the level of customer satisfaction seemed so high that we could be confident of continued support once the system was implemented.”

With the new system, Bethune-Cookman will be relieved of much of the burden of issuing refunds. Higher One provides marketing materials for the program, trains staff, collects, maintains and protects banking information and refund preferences, distributes refunds based on each student’s preference, handles returned payments, and fields all refund related customer service inquires from students and staff.