In this episode of CampusIDNews Chats, Rasheed Behrooznia and Taran Lent of Transact+CBORD discuss the company’s efforts to continue to advance product offerings.

Behrooznia confirmed increased investment in research and development, with 2025 marking yet another rise. On the product front, a key update is a new release of the CSGold platform—incorporating client-requested features, natural language queries, and improved access control support.

We have double the ideas and our R&D investments are going twice as far because we're not duplicating efforts on the same thing.

The company is also expanding AI and machine learning applications to enhance mobile ordering with more accurate wait time predictions. New tools for managing student event check-ins and entitlement systems – including new mobile hardware options – are also in the pipeline.

Lent emphasized the company's long-standing experience with cloud solutions, dating back to 2004. He cited that moving to the cloud remains critical to reducing total cost of ownership, increasing agility, and improving system reliability.

We just fundamentally believe products that are built to work well for people with challenges work better for everyone.

We just fundamentally believe products that are built to work well for people with challenges work better for everyone.

Transact+CBORD’s IDX platform—a cloud-native system currently used by over 100 institutions—is central to this strategy.

The upcoming summer release will introduce features such as embedded data visualizations, expanded security integrations, and mobile credential support.

To listen to the full conversation, click the image at the top of this page.

TRANSCRIPT:

Hello and welcome to Campus ID News Chats.

Today we're going to talk about what's new with the Transact plus CBORD product offering. I'm your host Chris Corum, publisher of Campus ID News, and joining me today are probably the two people who know more about the vision for the company's products than anybody else.

We've got Chief Technology Officer Taran Lent and EVP and GM for Campus ID and Commerce Rasheed Behrooznia aro.

So guys, appreciate you joining me today.

Thank you Chris for having us.

So I'm going to direct my questions at one of you individually, but don't feel like you're like trapped in a box. You know, the other one can come over the top or wait till the end and respond or something like that, but you can add in as you wish.

So with that, Rasheed, I'm going to direct the first one to you, okay?

Q: We spoke a while ago, shortly after the acquisition kind of blending of the companies began, and you mentioned that in addition to all the work that would go on there, there was going to be some significant investment put into the product offerings.

So it was a little early to talk about it back then, but can you share some of the details on that?

Behrooznia: Yeah, definitely. Just to kind of step back, you know, a couple kind of thoughts that we have, I mean, one, you know, in kind of the previous times we spoke, I've shared a lot of passion that we have, especially for our higher ed, and a lot of the individuals have been working kind of in this domain for a long time.

So we're very excited to kind of dig in and see what we can bring to market.

Kind of on top of that, you know, the company for the last five plus years has increased the R&D spend every year, and for 2025 in private state, we did that once again.

So some specific that I'm excited about, for our gold clients, we're releasing a new version of gold that's going to be coming out later this fall, had some exciting new features built into it, including some, you know, a lot of client ideas that have been requested into the product, which is always exciting for those clients, natural language queries and some other advancements with the product.

We also sat down and said, okay, how can we support our clients that are leveraging the CS Access solution?

So largely that security solution that many of our Gold and other clients use, and we're excited to share that we're going to be supporting that out into the future.

So that will, of course, be supported out with existing solutions today, but also integrated with our access control layer and supportive of ideas down to the future as well.

We're also integrating our point of sale system, so our commerce solution with the commerce API that supports our Odyssey and Gold clients.

You know, one of the things that I'm excited about, kind of on that commerce side, is we've invested in some AI and machine learning, and we're bringing to market some improved wait time predictions using that AI to help those mobile ordering clients with their mobile ordering prediction wait time and leveraging that AI and machine learning, which is very specific for the solutions and the university that is leveraging that solution as well.

Our data insights platform, which brings together some insights and analytics around the leverage of the system, we've released that out into our commerce platform, so that's available for our clients today.

And then we have a number of things also going in on the ID side, including we're re-imagining how entitlements work and bringing out solutions there, including a new verified terminal to manage activities and events with mobile solutions for check-in.

So a number of things that we're doing to kind of really bring some advanced new innovations out into our market space, both on our commerce platform and our ID platform for all of our clients.

Lent: Hey, by the way, just to add a little call to that, what I love about what Rasheed was talking about, our combination, is we have double the ideas, and then our R&D investments are going twice as far because we're not duplicating efforts on the same thing.

So it's pretty exciting, you know, to be in the product world from that respect.

What we're trying to do at our core is we want to help schools simplify their operations and elevate the end-user experience in a meaningful way.

And so, you know, I think what we can do that's unique is we're using our scale to build what we call enterprise grade, and enterprise grade for me means we do the hard things, and the hard things for us are going kind of next level with security and compliance, really going the extra mile on kind of design and user experience, including that is, you know, built into our DNA is accessibility.

We just fundamentally believe products that are built to work well for people with challenges work better for everyone.

You know, and all that's built on the foundation leveraging the latest most modern technologies and kind of obviously a cloud focus, but we're really framing the conversation of, you know, who are you going to trust for the next decade with your mission critical business, with your data, with your innovation, and we just think that we're in a really unique position to do that.

And, you know, at the end of the day, what we care about is when we demo our products that we're proud to demo them, and then when clients use the products or expose them to their end users, that they love it and that the experience is, you know, exceeds expectations.

Q: A couple of comments already about the cloud migration and things. So, sticking with that, Taran, we know the basic advantages of moving a system to the cloud. We use it every day with almost everything we do now, but in your world and in the world of these traditionally on-prem campus card and ID transaction system solutions, give us a summary of the advantages and the benefits you see from migrating those systems.

Lent: I was hoping you would ask a question along those lines, Chris. The first thing I have to say is the cloud is not new to transact. I think you were one of the very first people I talked to back in 2004 when I pioneered taking campus ID to the cloud, you know, with CardSmith.

If you look at our portfolio, payments have been in the cloud for a long time. You know, around 2018, we moved our cloud point of sale to the cloud. So, the cloud is not new to us, and we've been mastering and perfecting it, you know, for a couple of decades now.

You know, but what people need to understand is, to me, the first thing is just total cost of ownership. I think you get more capability at a lower cost when you do things in the cloud.

There's kind of what I would call modern business agility, you know, so technologies that are built to change in the future. For us as a software developer, we're just able to deliver value continuously and much faster than we can with legacy on-premise systems. There are economies of scale, which mostly translate into just better infrastructure for reliability, availability.

Availability is a big one for us.

And then it's just, you know, one of our themes is we want our clients to be more strategic and less tactical. So, it's about where you spend your time. And so, with cloud solutions, there's just less IT burden and overhead. There's a lot of studies out there that show it's a decrease of 30%. The pressure is on us to monitor the system, upgrade it, patch it, secure it, respond to whatever happens.

And so, you know, those are the obvious cloud things.

I think specific for our industry, there's also kind of the system interoperability.

So there's school networks, you know, like school systems or even like the College of the Fenway program we have in Boston, if you want schools to interop. So, I think there's just a lot of advantages when you get the technology in the cloud. And that's why so many industries are there or moving there quickly.

Q: Rasheed, so your cloud platform is the IDX platform. So, give us an update. Obviously, we're steering new clients and existing clients as they're ready to the IDX platform because of the cloud nature of it. How many are there? What's the growth look like? Kind of a general update on IDX.

Behrooznia: Yeah, absolutely.

I just want to touch on something that I really loved, which is, it's not just about moving clients to the cloud, it's about optimizing that experience, supporting them in their journey in a number of ways and looking for opportunities that leverage the best of these solutions, but bringing together optimizing, streamlining their operations, meeting them and the clients and the students where they work.

And of course, all the “illities.”

But to give you kind of some hard facts on where we are on IDX, we're over a hundred clients that are on the platform, hundreds of thousands of cardholders that are propped up, a million transactions.

We're exceptionally proud of the performance, which has exceeded our reliability desires, which has a hundred percent uptime, which is spectacular.

We focused very much on being thoughtful on how we wanted to approach this and, you know, not go too fast for the sake of going fast, but really focusing on a solid foundation built on the latest cloud technology, ensuring that we're, you know, have a thoughtful approach to supporting the clients there, which is why I think we have that success in that platform.

But yeah, 100 plus clients live, there's, you know, millions of clients back from process and very excited, kind of what we're going to bring to market.

We've got a few hundred more planned for this year and going into early of next year.

So quite a lot of work is going into that platform and some great results.

Lent: Something I just would add to that is it's a big endeavor, but we talked about that. We've been doing cloud solutions, going all the way back to 2004, there were kind of some other models that came out after Cardsmith that were kind of imitations of that. We could have kept riding in that direction, but we just think because of our leadership position, at some point you'd have to have life cycle discipline. 20 years is a pretty good run for technology and software.

And you know, we feel like we have a responsibility to reinvent and disrupt and take advantage of all the technology change. But like Rasheed said, we're doing that in a careful, thoughtful way. We're giving our customers lots of transparency. We're giving them lots of timeframe with our new platform. It's a proven model. We don't want anybody moving to it until they want to because of all the new features and capabilities.

And so it's, it's a journey, but great companies know when it's time to invest in the future. It's a tough decision to make, but we're pretty excited about kind of what lies ahead for us and our clients.

Q: We're, we're close to the end of our time here. So, I got one more question, Taran, this one's for you. I know last summer you had a big back to school release, maybe the summer before I can't remember, but, and there's another one planned coming up if I'm, if I'm right. So if so, can you, can you kind of tell us what the features are that people can look forward to?

Lent: The first thing is we're releasing all the time, you know, this is an agile continuous delivery, but we obviously know that schools need to have an understanding of what features are available for going into the next season.

We spent a lot of time on what we call data presentment. We intentionally don't use the word reporting because it goes beyond that, but you know, data that's embedded in context, where you are in the application, visualization of data, insights to help you make better decisions. Some of the table stakes things, like being able to schedule and deliver reports and data to the people that need it.

We're launching our first mobile credential IDX clients this summer.

So we did a lot of work just to make sure mobile credential is supported at the same level it was with our on-premise systems, you know, including our eAccounts mobile app, which by the way, I encourage people to check out the ratings.

You know, we're really proud of the, the ratings there because it's easy to say we care about user experience, but it's another thing to back it up with really high quality apps. We did a lot of work on this backwards compatibility, and we have hundreds of partners integrations with our legacy systems.

So we've added support for a lot of those legacy protocols just to bring those integrations forward.

We're doing a lot of stuff with security. So, we've done what I would call modern security integration with CS access, S2, Netbox, and Genia, so lots of security options for schools.

We've reimagined guest deposits, you know, Rasheed talked about entitlements, we've reimagined entitlements and privileges and that's coming out.

We have a cool feature around virtual card numbers. There is a lot of use cases for it, but one is working with mobile apps and apps where we don't want people to be able to pay with, you know, a single sign on or username and password.

And then we've done some modernization on our off-campus programs and the tech stack around that so that the off-camp campus programs will be renewed for the schools that have them and are continuing those going forward.

But that's just some of the big features, but a lot going on and wait two more weeks and there'll be more, more features we can tell you about just because that's how quickly the team is adding new capabilities and delivering value.

Q: Guys, I appreciate the time. Taran, Rasheed, have a great day. Thanks for, thanks for joining us and everybody out there. Thanks for, thanks for tuning in.