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Access+ E-Check
It's faster, easier, more secure, and saves Georgetown money
The 2001 anthrax attacks, which happened to coincide with Georgetown’s spring semester billing period, disrupted mail service to Washington, DC for months. President DeGioia waived late fees for checks received up to 60 days after the deadline, but students and their families still worried about tuition checks caught for weeks in the postal system.
The Office of the Registrar and the Office of Financial and Accounting Services needed a way to track checks from the moment they were sent until they were safely deposited into the university’s bank account. And it needed to be found quickly and built economically.
The offices’ solution was enlisting University Information Services to add bill payment to Student Access +. "What we've been able to do is create an environment where we can allow third parties to, with the student's approval, log on to Access+ and view that student's billing and make a payment," explained Bob Brokaw, Manager of Enterprise Web Development for UIS.
After a short development period from May 2002 to October 2003, the new Access+ service, named "E-Check", was ready for spring 2003 billing. Bob, along with colleagues Juanita Johnson, Bo Rose, Karen Dorschner, and others, helped develop the E-Check service.
E-Check allows students to pay bills electronically or authorize others to do so. In most cases, the student will log in to Access+ and authorize a third party to pay his or her bill. Access+ e-mails the authorized party a unique security code and a link to a Web page containing only the student's tuition bill and a secure online form for paying it. In accordance with the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA), no other information is accessible to the third party.
When the third party submits the online form, the information is encrypted and transferred over secure channels to SIS+. Authorized personnel from the Office of Financial and Accounting Services verify the data then transfer it to Riggs for processing and deposit into Georgetown University’s bank account. "Previously this was being done through a proprietary mechanism which was pretty antiquated," said Raghu Pemmaraju, Senior Manager of Enterprise Systems Integration for UIS. E-Check, says Pemmaraju, "allows us more flexibility now. We're not tied to the proprietary mechanism."
E-Check wasn’t heavily publicized at its debut. Still, 1,400 transactions totaling $6 million dollars were processed, affording the Registrar and Financial and Accounting Services a substantial savings in productivity and bank processing fees. The Office of the Registrar and the Office of Financial and Accounting Services look forward to more and more students and their families adopting E-Check during subsequent billing periods. To quote Carol Miller, the manager of Financial and Accounting Services, "the overall point is that is a wonderful service to offer to parents."
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