Boston-based Flywire plans to address this by acquiring OnPlan, a startup whose platform provides customers of universities and health care companies with a range of options to pay tuition and higher-cost medical service bills, including with recurring, automated and past-due payments.
OnPlan co-founders John Talaga, CEO, and David King, chief technology officer, will join Flywire’s leadership team and own stakes in the combined entity, the companies announced Thursday. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.
OnPlan, launched three years ago in Bannockburn, Ill., has been working with Flywire through a partnership, and the company recently saw an opportunity to expand by acquiring and integrating OnPlan’s platform into its own, said Sharon Butler, Flywire’s executive vice president of education and health care.
“By coming together with OnPlan, we’re expanding our cross-border payments services with more ways for billers to send invoices and receive and track those funds securely in whatever stage the payment arrives—all at once, in installments or past due,” Butler said.
OnPlan’s platform currently serves clients in the education and health care industries, and under Flywire its services will be available for the first time outside the U.S., said John Talaga, OnPlan’s CEO. OnPlan Health enables medical organizations to give patients more options for paying high out-of-pocket costs, which prevents costs associated with billing and collections on overdue balances.
With OnPlanU, colleges and universities can tailor tuition-payment programs for students and their parents with programs, including setting up automated payments in advance, stretching payments out over longer periods and even handling refunds, Talaga said.
“Uniting Flywire’s cross-border payments network together with our two divisions, OnPlan Health and OnPlan U, creates a solution that will remove cost and friction for a lot of clients,” Talaga said.
Flywire will still work with other partners in the U.S. and overseas as it continues to expand to new markets, Butler said.
“Flywire has had a lot of success in enabling cross-border payments for education and health care and in other industries through business-to-business payments, but now we’ll be able to offer specialized payment plans to both international and domestic customers, which should accelerate our growth,” Butler said.
