Epayment system for withdrawing academic transcripts online

A significant amount of time of students is being wasted to submit an application for withdrawing academic transcript. The process includes going to the resident bank of the respective university to make payment and submit a paper-based application. 

We are providing an integrated system to make payment and submit the application online. This integration brings all parties such as the bank, the office of the exam controller and the applicant under one single platform. 

Our novel solution reduces the application process time by removing an applicant's travel time to the exam controller office and providing the online tracking number to track their application. We also provide email notifications with courier/DHL tracking number to track their package when it is sent to the applicant's given address.

Below is an estimation of prospective effect we can make if we could roll out our e-Payment system only for all universities in Bangladesh. Similar sort of estimation could be done for schools and colleges as well.

There are about 90 universities in Bangladesh without our service or a comparable service. That means that about half a million students are affected. Now if we add schools and colleges this number keeps increasing.

We were few of those students faced this difficulty. Therefore we know this need as a first hand experience. Our e-payment solution addresses the need of making online payment for student very well. While we were facing this problem as a student we felt the need of having an online payment system which could eventually remove a lot of hassle for the students and save a significant amount of time for us.

Therefore we have decided to make a solution which would address this need.

Our e-Payment service is a completely new concept for students in Bangladesh. It is a way where a student or their guardian can pay their academic fees online by using their credit/debit cards. Currently students of SUST can apply and pay fees for their academic transcript via our e-Payment system. The Payment Gateway System is authorised by Bangladesh Bank.

Moreover, we have added third party courier services (DHL, FedEx, etc.) for delivering student transcripts nationally and internationally. Currently, university authorities do not send transcripts to students’ given addresses. Since students need to send their transcript to many places especially to foreign graduate schools, we have added this feature so that they can send it straightway to graduate schools by paying service fees through our e-Payment system. 

Unlike other payment service providers in Bangladesh, we are aimed and dedicated to facilitating e-Payment service only to academic organisations. Our pilot project for SUST has been happily accepted by the students and the authorities.

"Service is a web application hosted in a server, built using modern web technologies."

This type of e-payment service in educational sectors in Bangladesh is not as common as it is in the USA. We have introduced it for the first time in Bangladesh. Now we would like to extend our service to reach as many educational institutes in Bangladesh as possible.

Currently we are serving approximately 200 users per month just from one university. 

If we roll out our service to 90 universities in Bangladesh, we'll be serving around 120000 users in one year and 600000 in about five years.

Adding schools and colleges under this service would keep increasing the number.

Currently our system is designed only to provide e-payment service for academic transcript fees for SUST. We are aiming to extend our e-payment for all sorts of fees (including admission fees, semester fees, convocation fees, and so on) for students within one year.

Eventually we are planning to roll out complete e-payment service for all sorts of fees to the rest of the universities in Bangladesh.

The majority of the administrative job in public universities in Bangladesh are done in old school style and people are hesitant to accept new technologies to execute their daily jobs. So the major obstacle for us to convince them to embrace our service.

As soon as they realize that the same paper work can be done online which is much faster than the current process, they accept it which we already observed at our current service area.  

4 part-time staff

1 full-time staff

We are a highly qualified team consists of Full-time researcher, Software engineers with industry experiences.

We have got hands-on experience in Software and web application development using the latest technologies including HTMP5, CSS, Nodejs, Golang,  MySQL, Postgres, RESTAPIs, Docker, Kubernetes, GCP to name a few.

Additionally, we experienced this problem while we were a student. That gave us the unique opportunity to fill the gap for everyone with our service. We have been receiving very positive feedback from our users since we launched the service.  

We partnered with Shahjalal University including all affiliated colleges, Dutch Bangla Bank Ltd., Brac Bank, and bKash to provide our services.  

Basically we will make money by incurring service charges. We have schools, colleges, medical colleges and universities where students need to pay course registration fees, late fees, transcript fees, commencement fees, etc. These fees can be paid through our service. Therefore, students will have to pay a service charge to acquire our service which would be a reasonable amount. In our pilot project, we are in small profits and  our defined service charge in pilot project is lesser than the current bank fees. Moreover, students will be able to send their transcripts directly to other schools or to their given address by using our third party courier services. They should also be able to monitor their application status online. At present, students need to go to university physically to collect their transcript. On top of physical visit there are other bureaucratic hassles they face. But if they go through our e-Payment service and pay the service charge then our company makes it much easier for them to send transcript to their given address. Besides service charge, eventually we will introduce other paid services like subscribing academic results and updates, parents and students can be notified  by sms for those updates, etc.

By teaming up with Tiger Challenge, we can get the additional operating costs as funding to reach out to the major public universities in Bangladesh to introduce and promote our current service.