73 Higher Education Institutions Now Using Higher One's Services Enabling Students to Receive Money Faster And With More Refund Choices
New Haven, CT - April 2007 - Higher One, a technology-driven financial services company serving higher education, announced today that HACC, Central Pennsylvania's Community College has signed an agreement to implement Higher One's OneDisburse Refund Management improving the disbursement of refunds to their students. HACC will begin using the service effective August of this year.
"HACC is extremely excited to be working with Higher One," said John Eberly, Assistant Controller. "Our partnership with Higher One will enable us to provide our students with better customer service. By allowing the students to select the method of refund disbursement that is most convenient to them we have been able to get the refunds to the students faster and with flexible options, while at the same time reducing administrative costs and subsequently freeing up staff to concentrate on other student-focused initiatives."
Higher One's OneDisburse Refund Management streamlines the entire disbursement process in which all disbursements and reconciliation are managed electronically and customer service needs are handled directly by Higher One. As a result, HACC will benefit from the elimination of time-consuming functions, paper checks and errors while realizing significant cost savings throughout the organization. As part of the service, students will also be able to choose how they receive their refunds including the option to open a HigherOne OneAccount, a free FDIC insured checking account linked to a OneCard Debit MasterCard.
"We are pleased to be providing HACC with a program that offers significant cost savings for the institution as well as more choices for students," said Dean Hatton, President & CEO, Higher One. "The higher education community is quickly embracing solutions such as Higher One's OneDisburse as colleges and universities nationwide look to improve their student services and decrease administrative costs."
With this signing, 73 colleges and universities in the U.S. have now signed on to use Higher One's services. Since September 2002, Higher One has managed the disbursement of $2.2 billion for its client institutions totaling more than 1.6 million transactions. In that time period over one million students, faculty, and staff at these institutions have used Higher One's services through their ID or refund card.
About Higher One
Focused exclusively on higher education, Higher One provides Refund Management to higher education institutions and banking services to members of their community through a card based solution. Higher One's integrated solution helps it's clients reduce administrative costs, streamline business processes, create new revenue streams, increase student customer service and strengthen the campus community. Higher One's OneDisburse provides students with more choices and better services for receiving financial refunds and payroll. Higher One also offers a suite of banking services called OneFinanceSM, which includes the OneAccount, a no minimum balance, no monthly fee checking account with the OneCard, a Debit MasterCard for ATM withdrawals and purchases, and exclusive features such as "Send Money", Easy RefundSM, and Campus AutoLoad. The OneFinanceSM and OneDisburse solutions can be integrated with the institution's ID card or provided through a separate "refund only" card.
To date, Higher One has disbursed $2 billion dollars in refunds for its clients. More than 600,000 students, faculty, and staff at distinguished public and private higher education institutions use Higher One's services through their ID or refund card.
About HACC, Central Pennsylvania's Community College
HACC serves more than 18 thousand degree-seeking students in a ten county region in Central Pennsylvania. In addition, the college serves more than 35 thousand students in its workforce development and community education programs. The college operates campuses in Harrisburg, Lancaster, Lebanon, Gettysburg and York as well as a rapidly growing virtual campus for online courses and a number of off-campus community sites. As Central Pennsylvania's Community College, HACC provides degree and diploma programs in more than 154 fields.