Card, mobile credential, payment and security
Campus entrant FutureState emerges from University of Arizona with cloud-native dining solution
FutureState, a new entrant to the campus credential, dining, and auxiliary service space, announced its new closed-loop, stored value and meal plan offering called BalanceU.
“FutureState’s BalanceU is designed to help colleges and universities lower operating costs, eliminate vendor lock-in, and gain real-time financial visibility across campus,” says Christopher Augustine, Co-Founder and Head of Product Development at FutureState.
It is hardware-agnostic so institutions can choose the front-end systems that best meet their goals without being constrained by legacy one-card architectures, he explains.
Because we are not weighed down with legacy codebase, we can iterate quicker to meet emerging needs like roll over meals and donated meals to food insecurity programs.
BalanceU eliminates some of the costs that are common in traditional meal plan environments, such as fixed POS integration fees, charges for access to real-time balance data, and forced hardware replacements.
Augustine says institutions only pay for what they use, and existing systems already deployed on campus can be redirected to operate with BalanceU.
FutureState began as a project at the University of Arizona.
In 2025, Arizona took a unique approach to campus transactions, identity, and mobile credentials. The institution created its own software ‘layer’ between the credential and the multitude of campus systems that consume the credential. At its most basic form, they created a hub that manages API endpoints.
It connects the wide array of services on the campus – access control, housing, campus rec, dining, retail, parking, attendance, events, vending, laundry – to the credential manager. Because the university controls this layer, they can swap out both the upstream credential manager as well as any downstream consuming system without disrupting the larger network.
It is a radical change from the way it has always been done in higher ed. Traditionally, the transaction system or the access control system managed these connections, and this locked the campus to that vendor.
The Arizona project was led by two of the leaders of Administrative and Auxiliary Operations, Sr. Director of IT Joe Harting and IT Project Manager Chris Augustine.
“What we built sounds basic and logical, but it is a radical change from the way it has always been done in higher ed,” says Harting. “Traditionally, the transaction system or the access control system managed these connections, and this locked the campus to that vendor.”
Harting believes they have upended an outdated model, and now they hope to help other institutions benefit from their work. In this pursuit, they founded a private company called FutureState.
In the same way that the company’s credential solution is designed to integrate the array of the wider campus vendor solutions, the FutureState meal plan solution connects to a broad range of dining-centric vendors.
Supported systems include:
Self-service retail integrations include:
FutureState founders say BalanceU provides free, unrestricted access to real-time meal plan and stored value balance data. This ensures institutions can power mobile apps, parent portals, analytics tools, and reporting systems without additional cost.
“Our goal from the beginning was to give institutions immediate access to their own data so they could do things like display balances and transaction history alongside the mobile credential,” says Augustine. “You shouldn’t have to negotiate with your transaction system provider or pay additional fees to use your campus data.”
With decades of experience in auxiliary services, Harting says he understands the complexities of meal plans.
“Because we built BalanceU from the ground up using an AI native development stack, we are able to incorporate the normal dining feature set as well as features I’d wished were available through my years running both card and meal plan offices,” explains Harting. “Because we are not weighed down with legacy infrastructure and codebase, we will also be able to iterate quicker to meet key emerging needs like roll over meals and donated meals to food insecurity programs.”
FutureState will showcase BalanceU at the NACCU Annual Conference in Covington, KY, April 19-22, 2026. They are seeking a small group of colleges and universities to pilot BalanceU in Fall 2026, ahead of general availability in Q1 2027.
