Flywire is like Beyoncé in Destiny's Child: the standout star from a group of fantastic performers in their own right. 💃🏼 So while Part 1 and 2 of this series will cover most of the material you need to know about using payment gateways to handle application fees and you should absolutely not skip them (!), there are aspects to Flywire which merit a closer look. Pick up your monocle and let's get to it! 🧐

➜ Why should I partner with Flywire?

➜ How can I integrate with Flywire?

➜ How do applicants experience Flywire?

➜ How can I manage bank transfers with Flywire?

Like PayPal and Stripe, Flywire is a payment gateway, but with the important distinction that it was specifically conceived for the education sector by a former international student who experienced firsthand how traditional payment services often fail their customers. Consequently, while at first glance not dissimilar from its competition, a few adjustments give Flywire an edge, which you can read about at length here.

To set up Flywire in your instance, we'll need your school's Recipient code, which is available in your Flywire account, so please share it with us.

Once activated, adding Flywire as a payment option to an application template is accomplished much in the same manner as with PayPal or Stripe: you access an application template of your choosing, navigate to the tab Payment, switch Disabled to Enabled, select Flywire under Gateway, pick a currency and define an Application fee (more in-depth guidance here). However, Flywire has an additional field: Payment instruction notes (optional), which is particularly useful for deposits and bank transfers (more on that later):

Unlike Stripe and PayPal, Flywire requires that candidates fill in their billing information, lest it differ from the data inputted elsewhere in the application form – for instance, due to the payment being made in someone else's name, like a parent or a spouse. Because of that, there's no way to map the fields in the payment form to others in the application form.

Furthermore, by capturing the billing information at the time of payment, payments are properly credited in a timely manner and the applicant is notified when his or her payment is received through a confirmation email.

After the payment form is completed and candidates click PAY WITH FLYWIRE, Flywire instantly validates if all fields are filled out and contain valid information and proceeds to display the following modal:

In it, applicants are requested to choose a payment method, whereby they're accordingly redirected to the corresponding steps. When candidates pay the application fee and exit the modal, they return inside the Payment tab. The payment status is automatically updated in FULL FABRIC:

Both the Flywire form and modal are always translated into whatever language FULL FABRIC's platform is in, be it English, French, German, or another one.

If you've been reading so far, you'll probably have noticed a few observations singling out bank transfers. That's because the process with them is slightly more complex. By their very nature, bank transfers necessarily involve a manual component, namely the action of manually transferring funds from one bank account to another through an IBAN number. And while the actual timing will vary by bank and by country, it can take up to several business days for the money to arrive. As a result, the operation is considered to be on hold by the system until it gets confirmation from Flywire that the money's been deposited into the school's account. Meanwhile, the following message is displayed to candidates:

Once confirmation is received via the API, the fee is automatically marked as Paid in FULL FABRIC and the status inside the application form is likewise updated.

Another thing is that, when candidates elect bank transfer as their payment method, they have two options next: immediately carrying out the operation and clicking I HAVE COMPLETED THE TRANSFER, or, alternatively, deciding I WANT TO PAY LATER:

Either way, we mentioned the field Payment instruction notes earlier on as being particularly useful to bank transfers because it allows you to permanently display key data, such as your school's IBAN number (in case students didn't copy it when first given the chance).

And that's it! 😉

You have reached the end of this article. Thanks for reading! 🤓 If you have any questions or comments on the topic at hand, or if you enjoy reads like this and have article requests, feel free to start a chat or email us at support@fullfabric.com. Also, please leave a rating below. Your feedback is highly appreciated! 💖

​PUBLISHED: April 21, 2021
​LAST UPDATED: October 12, 2021 at 6:16 p.m.