When my colleagues and I set out to build an online billing and payments solution for higher education in 1997, roughly 35 percent of U.S. households owned a computer. Building and developing something that presented billing information and securely processed digital tuition payments was really complicated. As engineers, we wrote every line of code and built the experiences from scratch. Instructions on the site just telling families how to complete a payment were two paragraphs long. But at the time, it was revolutionary.
Now, it’s not. The ability to process payments online, securely, is a baseline expectation for institutions and the students they serve. And serving the needs of industries that routinely need to process high-value and high-stakes payments takes more than just delivering the money.
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