Case studies / UCD Professional Academy

Enhancing Student Enrollment with Flexible Payment Solutions

UCD Professional Academy, a leader in professional education, continuously evolves its digital infrastructure to provide a seamless student experience. As part of this commitment, UCD sought to introduce phased payment plans and expand available payment methods, ensuring that more students could access its courses without financial barriers. Square1 developed a custom Stripe integration, allowing students to enroll with flexible payment schedules while maintaining seamless financial reconciliation. The solution, built as a serverless middleware application, integrates directly with UCD’s enrollment system, providing an effortless and intuitive payment experience for students while ensuring financial oversight remains streamlined.

UCD Professional Academy Logo
Stripe
Dublin, Ireland

UCD Professional Academy – Transforming Payment Infrastructure with Square1

UCD Professional Academy is committed to providing high-quality, career-focused education. As demand for greater payment flexibility grew, UCD identified an opportunity to enhance student accessibility while ensuring that financial operations remained efficient. The plan was to move from offering only up-front payment, to bespoke payment plans, customised by UCD admin on a course-by-course basis.

To achieve this, UCD partnered with Square1, leveraging its expertise in Stripe integrations to develop a tailored middleware solution. This system enables phased payment schedules, expanded payment options - including digital wallets like Google Pay and Apple Pay - and an automated financial workflow that ensures transactions are structured correctly for seamless reconciliation with UCD’s existing systems.

By integrating these enhancements while keeping UCD’s existing processes intact, the solution ensured a frictionless student experience and optimised financial reporting, without introducing complexity or additional operational burdens.

Meet UCD

Company Overview

UCD Professional Academy, a division of University College Dublin, provides industry-relevant education for professionals looking to advance their careers. Offering courses across business, technology, and personal development, the academy serves thousands of students annually, equipping them with practical skills for the modern workforce.

A key part of UCD’s digital strategy is ensuring that students can enroll and pay with ease, without unnecessary friction. Recognising the growing demand for flexible payment options, UCD set out to enhance its payment infrastructure to improve accessibility while maintaining financial accuracy.

Seamless online enrollment and payment experience at UCD Professional Academy

The Challenge

UCD had an established Stripe payment integration within its enrollment system, allowing students to pay tuition fees online. However, this setup only supported one-time payments at registration, limiting accessibility for students who preferred to spread their tuition costs over time.

To address this, UCD sought a solution that would:

  • Introduce phased payment plans, making professional education more financially accessible.
  • Expand the range of available payment methods, ensuring students could pay using their preferred platform.
  • Maintain automated reconciliation within UCD’s financial systems, avoiding any need for manual tracking.

The key challenge was integrating these new capabilities into UCD’s existing infrastructure without disrupting enrollment workflows or creating additional administrative complexity.

Solution Elevating User-Experience

The Solution

Square1 developed a serverless middleware solution, designed to bridge Stripe and UCD’s enrollment system while introducing advanced payment capabilities. This system operates behind the scenes, dynamically generating Stripe Checkout sessions based on student data, ensuring that each transaction is correctly structured for reconciliation.

A crucial part of the solution was the ability to create bespoke payment plans on demand. Leveraging Stripe’s Billing product, the system ensures that automated revenue recovery processes are in place for missed payments, reducing manual intervention and improving overall financial efficiency.

Beyond payment processing, comprehensive metadata tagging was implemented across customers, invoices, and subscriptions. This enhancement allows for seamless financial reporting, ensuring that transactions remain fully traceable within UCD’s existing reconciliation system.

Optimising the User Experience

One of the key considerations during development was ensuring that students experienced a smooth and professional payment journey. Because the middleware required real-time API interactions between Stripe and UCD’s enrollment system, additional processing time was introduced when students transitioned between systems, before a checkout would be shown.

To maintain a seamless experience, Square1 designed a UCD-branded waiting page that was displayed immediately while backend processing took place. This solution ensured that students saw instant visual feedback, reinforcing confidence in the process while allowing the system to complete necessary verifications in the background.

This approach eliminated perceived delays, ensuring that the payment process felt fast and fluid, despite the complex interactions occurring behind the scenes.

Result Empowering Engagement

Implementation

The middleware was designed as a fully automated, low-maintenance solution, deployed in a serverless AWS Lambda environment. This architecture eliminated the need for dedicated infrastructure and ensured high availability and scalability without placing additional demands on UCD’s internal teams.

By seamlessly integrating into UCD’s existing financial systems, the solution ensured:

  • Minimal disruption to existing workflows - staff could continue using the same processes they were familiar with.
  • Automated data reconciliation, with Stripe transactions structured to match UCD’s financial reporting formats.
  • Effortless student onboarding, allowing payments to be processed smoothly without additional manual intervention.

During development, additional verification steps were introduced to enhance security and accuracy, ensuring that the system remained robust, scalable, and future-proof.

Solution Elevating User-Experience

The Result

Since implementation, UCD has experienced significant improvements in student payment accessibility and financial efficiency.

  • Successful uptake of installment plans by students, making professional education more accessible.
  • More reliable reconciliation processes, with payments integrating seamlessly into existing financial systems.
  • A frictionless payment experience, with students benefiting from an intuitive and responsive checkout process, with additional payment methods being made available.

Crucially, this transformation was achieved without disrupting existing workflows. The middleware solution functioned as an invisible extension of UCD’s payment infrastructure, allowing administrators to continue working with their existing financial tools while providing enhanced payment options for students.

By striking the right balance between technical innovation and operational efficiency, Square1 has helped UCD scale its professional education programs while maintaining a best-in-class student experience.

Result Empowering Engagement

UCD Professional Academy’s successful Stripe transformation demonstrates how tailored payment solutions can improve accessibility, enhance automation, and optimise financial operations.

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