Campus card banking partners step up to educate student cardholders

Get a bunch of students, mostly freshmen, away from home for the first time. Stick them all in a dorm, many of them are armed checks, a credit card, a student ID, their driver license and Social Security card. It's a recipe for ID theft.

Issuing combined student IDs and bank cards on campus reduces the time it takes to get these multifunction cards into students’ hands, and it enables them to begin using the card the moment they exit the campus card office. But if that card was a branded Visa or MasterCard product, this hasn’t been possible for most issuers.

Have off-campus programs become a virtual necessity for card programs?

By Andy Williams
Contributing Editor

The decision to allow off-campus merchants, mainly restaurants and bookstores, to access students’ prepaid accounts used to be an easy one to answer: no way. But that attitude among colleges has been changing as more have found that on-campus income didn’t plummet as feared. Surprisingly, in many cases, it actually increased. Even one major campus dining provider saw that proverbial handwriting and two years ago acquired a company specializing in off-campus markets.

Annual CR80News survey shows growth rates drop by half from prior year

By Chris Corum & Andy Williams, Executive & Contributing Editors

The number of partnerships between campus card programs and financial institutions continued to grow in 2007, though not as rapidly as in recent years. The annual CR80News campus card/banking partnership survey reported a modest increase of 8% in 2007, down from 16% growth in 2006 and a 30% average growth in 2004 and 2005.

Purchase jumpstarts payment processor’s entry into the college and university market

By Andy Williams, Contributing Editor

The recently announced purchase of campus card supplier General Meters Corp. (GMC) by payments processors, Heartland Payment Systems, has likely delivered the resources the small company needed to stay competitive.

Heartland’s campus card appetite was first whetted with its Slippery Rock University experience in mid-2007. The provider of credit/debit/prepaid card processing, payroll and payment services implemented a campus card program at the Pennsylvania campus that involved the ubiquitous cell phone and the campus card.

Designing, creating and getting approval for a functional card office facility

By Andy Williams Contributing Editor

Space is usually a premium at most colleges and universities. So when Georgia Tech underwent an expansion of its card office a couple years ago, it realized it may need room to grow. James Pete, director of the Buzz Card Center, the name of Georgia Tech's campus card, a take on the university's Yellow Jackets nickname, compares a card office to what he calls "the Web effect. It will never get smaller, just larger and more complex as the years go by."

“Software as a service” model takes off

By Andy Williams, Contributing Editor

Colleges and universities aren’t that different from corporations. Educational institutions are under the same pressure to keep costs down, and anything that can be done to help institutions save money piques their interest.

That’s one of the big selling points of a relatively new concept called software as a service, or SaaS for short. Many may know it by its precursor: application service provider, or ASP.

"It's no longer simply about putting a photo on a white piece of plastic," says Ryan Park, Fargo Electronics’ director of product marketing for secure printers/encoders. "It's just not secure. Unfortunately, that represents a lot of the ID vehicles out there today. There are very few applications in the ID card world that don't have a need for security."

Colleges have other options for cell phone alerts, of course. They could go off campus and hire a company specializing in text messaging. That's what Rave Wireless and Mobile Campus are offering to universities.

Rave offers what its COO, Raju Rishi, calls "an alert solution, which basically gives the university the ability to get emergency broadcasting to the entire school or a subset of the school (like students who live on campus), whether it's about a gas leak or orientation. The university pays us for that capability yearly. We tie into Blackboard (campus card solution)," he added, "so we don't have to recreate the lists."

Get a bunch of students, mostly freshmen, away from home for the first time. Stick them all in a dorm, many of them are armed with a checking account and checks, a credit card, a student ID card, their driver license and Social Security card. It's a recipe for ID theft.

Realizing that, many colleges and universities, with the help of their banking partners, have incorporated ID theft prevention techniques into their financial wellness seminars.