Provide your perspective on bank partnerships with campus card programs.

Jeff Zander, Vice President, General Meters:
“Typically, banks have not generated the kind of revenue (to their bottom line) to justify long term interest and national support of campus card programs.”

Mark Reinart, Mgr Marketing Systems and Development, Diebold:
“Universities and colleges are looking for ways to boost revenues, while financial institutions are looking for ways to build relationships with students. It is an ideal partnership as long as the educational institution has a system like CS Gold 4.0 that is flexible and can easily be integrated into their infrastructure… We can point to a growing number of CS Gold campuses where mutually successful partnerships exist.”

Bruce Lance, Vice President, CBORD Group:
“Bank “partnerships” have been around for more than a decade. The landscape is littered with failed banking relationships - some for technical reasons (having gone the smart card route) and some because one side too dominated the benefits side of the equation. When we saw banks getting carte blanche access to the student base in return for the relatively measly price of a video imaging system, schools reacted by asking for the sky, which didn’t work out well either. There are some interesting new twists on things now with HigherOne and CampusMate… If (this) new group of bank services vendors can manage to give good value to students, parents, and schools, while still making enough money or new customers to consider the program successful, then that will be a big step forward. CBORD is working on interfaces to both HigherOne and CampusMate for our customers that choose to try those approaches.”

Jim Hermens, General Manager of Transaction Systems, Blackboard:
Bank partnerships have been a historically important enhancement to student services and card programs for approximately 30% of campuses that currently have any type of card program. We believe this to be a very viable choice for campuses who desire to formalize, through the campus, the marketing activities that banks are going to perform anyway, without campus sponsorship. Capturing part of this value and associated revenues while increasing student satisfaction with a banking relationship that rides on top of a campus card program makes sense to our campuses. At Blackboard we believe our role is to facilitate this choice. We have had one bank formally join our Building Blocks program and several others that have approached us, encouraged by the campuses who deploy our Transaction System and with whom they have relationships. This open choice approach, we believe, is in the best interest of our clients.

Bob Merkert, National Accounts Manager, Colleges and Universities, Ingenico/Debitek:
Campus card programs with banking relationships are not for every campus. The banked campus card programs need to make financial sense to all of the parties involved—the student, college, and banking partners. The intent of most of these programs is to (enable) the card to be used in more locations making financial transactions easier and more efficient. While this sounds good to everyone…, one needs to look at the financial case. At some colleges it is difficult to justify. In addition, it is strongly suggested that (the college) own the ISO number in case they change banking partners down the road.