WeChat Pay, Flywire make Chinese students’ overseas tuition payments ‘as easy as sending a chat’
- Flywire’s ‘direct connection with Tencent makes the payment experience more convenient and streamlined’, executive at US firm says
- Confident that new partnership with Flywire will make paying for education ‘as easy as sending a chat’: Tencent
Boston, Massachusetts-based Flywire, a major cross-border payments platform for universities globally, said on Thursday that the “direct connection” with WeChat Pay – known as Weixin Pay in mainland China – would make it easier for Chinese students and their families to make tuition payments from China.
“Flywire has long offered Weixin Pay as a payment method, but the direct connection with Tencent makes the payment experience more convenient and streamlined,” Mohit Kansal, Flywire’s senior vice-president of global payments and payer services, said in a statement without providing further details.
The new partnership comes amid rising cross-border activity following the reopening of China’s borders. A rising number of Chinese students are seeking higher education abroad after Beijing dropped its stringent Covid-19 control policies late last year.
In January, the Chinese Service Centre for Scholarly Exchange, an education agency responsible for verifying foreign higher education qualifications, said that it would no longer recognise foreign certificates gained through remote studying – a common arrangement during the pandemic. Chinese students must, therefore, return to in-person classes at overseas universities.