Flywire Expands in Canada with ScholarFX Acquisition
Cross-border payment solutions provider Flywire continues its rapid expansion, this time in Canada with the acquisition of ScholarFX, which processes tuition, room and board payments for international students attending schools in the country.
With the acquisition, Flywire now serves almost 900 colleges and universities worldwide.
As part of the deal, Darren Chadwick, founder of ScholarFX, will join Flywire Canada in a leadership position.
Existing educational clients will migrate to the Flywire platform over the next months.
International students attending colleges and universities in Canada are set to benefit from Flywire’s best-in-class currency conversion rates, multi-lingual customer service as well as the ability to pay in 70 local currencies.
For educational institutions, Flywire provides payment reconciliation tools, user-friendly digital tracking and global account servicing.
Flywire’s newest acquisition follows its successful acquisition of UK-based Uni-Pay, and its continued robust growth.
Formerly PeerTransfer, Flywire is on course to process $2 billion in tuition, room and board payments in the academic year ending spring this year, doubling last year’s volume.
Mike Massaro, CEO of Flywire, commented, “The acquisition of ScholarFX expands our ability to attract and service Canadian educational institutions while adding to the scale of our industry-leading cross-border payment platform. ScholarFX has a great understanding of the Canadian market and their personalized, customer-centric approach to service is perfectly aligned with ours. We’re also excited to add Darren Chadwick to our team, and to bring all the advantages of our solution to this fast-growing market.”
With ScholarFX on board, Flywire taps into a fast growing market for international education. Based on figures from the Canadian Bureau for International Education (CBIE), Canada saw an 83 percent growth in the number of international students from 2008 to more than 330,000 in school year 2014 – 2015. Most of the international students are from China, India, France, South Korea and the US.