Transact Insights is a platform to help campuses aggregate data to predict trends, optimize financial management and enhance operations. It was recently announced that via integration with Microsoft Power BI, users can connect their data to leading business intelligence applications.

Transact Insights is part of Transact’s Integrated Payments solutions, but in the future, the company says it is poised for deeper integration with Transact Campus Commerce and Transact Campus ID. This, they say, will unlock actionable insights from campus retail and mobile ID data to help campuses derive greater value from their data.

We plan to ingest real-time data from IDX to provide insights for declining balance and meal plan transactions, events and activities, and door access

To learn more about plans for Transact Insights in the transaction system and credential space, CampusIDNews talked with Ian Ashworth, Director, API Platform at Transact Campus.

Question: What are the plans for Insights in commerce/ID?

Part of the power of insights is to bring data from across all Transact-powered Campus operations – dining, commerce, door access, payments, and billing – into one central data platform. Starting in Q4 2024, we will launch Commerce data that will provide real-time transactional dashboards for patron counts across all dining locations alongside recorded and historical data for in-depth menu engineering, operations analysis, and executive-level sales and revenue reporting. For 2025, we plan to ingest real-time data from our next-generation Transaction System in Campus ID – IDX – to provide the same insights for declining balance and meal plan transactions as well as events and activities and door access to get a true picture of student behavior on campus.

Question: How will this enable campuses to better use their data for informed actions?

In today’s campuses, every interaction a student has with the systems and processes that enable their daily life is usually recorded as a transaction within a digital system. These transactions range from where they eat, if they attend their lectures, pay their tuition bill on time, where and when they move across campus, how often they do laundry, or how many Energy Drinks they buy at the library at 2 am before exams. These transactions hold a wealth of data on student behavior on campus. Essentially, this is the richest source of information on student behavior throughout their time with an institution—and today, not much is done with it. Imagine if you could harness that data and merge it with your Student Information System (SIS) data on academic performance to create an anonymous profile of a successful student, or one that is struggling. You can, with Transact Insights.

Furthermore, because of Transact’s vast number of clients from across the US, Canada and Australia, Insights can provide aggregated benchmarking data for comparison with all types of Institutions in different regions. Want to find out if there is a macro trend on late payments for tuition or is it specific to your campus or region? How about what dining trends are becoming popular in other regions for which you need to prepare you menus? Transact is planning to provide Industry Benchmarking features such as this in 2025.

Question: What are some of the specific features of the platform today?

Campuses can gain valuable insights on Payment Plan Enrollment, allowing them to analyze semester-on-semester, year-on-year, month-on-month trends within and between payment plans. This helps institutions identify repayment risks and offer the most effective plans for students, thus improving retention.

By monitoring transaction volume, institutions can proactively address anomalies and have better visibility into payments processed by module, transaction type, card type, and more.

Control payment plans using late payment plan analysis to proactively address issues, ensure a steady cash flow, and improve student retention. Users are also able to monitor repayment trends on an installment basis between plans and semesters, a capability not offered in existing reports.

Institutions can create custom reports and dashboards from popular reporting tools or connect to their central data warehouse in a few clicks, removing the need for tedious data manipulation and Extract, Transform, Load (ETL) processes.