Next up: School ID that doubles as payment card

MANILA, Philippines - It is interesting how technology is changing classroom learning and pedagogy, but a local finance technology company is taking another route to campus transformation: re-inventing the school ID to double as an attendance monitoring tool and payment card.

 Six schools in Metro Manila under the umbrella of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Manila Educational System (RCAM ES) Clusters 5 and 6 are pilot testing the technology. It is now live in two of its schools — the Espiritu Santo Parochial School of Manila (ESPS) and Manila Cathedral school. Four other schools will have live implementations by the end of this quarter.

 Sharon Kayanan, marketing branch head, PayMaya Philippines, explains that the innovative school ID has an embedded Radio-Frequency Identification (RFID) chip that when tapped at the school gate could send a notification in the school’s backend system that the student has arrived. It functions as an attendance record.

 Second, the ID also serves as a payment card, which allows students to pay for anything within the school premises - food and beverage at the canteen, books and school supplies at the school bookstore, or school fees at the Registrar’s Office.

This is the latest variant of the virtual debit card that resides in an app launched in 2015 by PayMaya Philippines, the digital financial services arm of PLDT and Smart Communications and a unit of Voyager Innovations.

 The app, which can be downloaded for free from the Google Play Store and the App Store, allows the user to pay for online purchases, utility bills, Uber rides, food deliveries and many others. Users can also request a physical Visa card that can be used in physical stores that accept Visa here or abroad.

 Benjie Fernandez, co-COO of PayMaya Philippines, says that the initiative is more about financial inclusion than just pioneering a high-tech school ID.

“When we think of financial inclusion, we always think about the unbanked and the uncarded at the bottom of the pyramid, but it is not the only use case. There is a  bigger chunk that is also underserved and they are not at the bottom of the pyramid. These are the Millennials who can’t qualify yet for a credit card, the students who have yet to earn an income, the contractual workers, the freelancers, and just about anyone who need to be included in the digital financial ecosystem,” he explains.

 According to data from the Philippine Statistics Office and the Department of Education, 35 percent of the country’s population belong to the Millennial generation, 29 million of which are students that do not have a bank account or credit card.

Kayanan says that during the pilot test of the cards, the feedback was very positive from the parents and the school administrators. For one, the parents get a real-time SMS notification every time a student enters or leaves the campus, and every time they purchase something in school.

“The card is funded by the parents so it’s linked to their accounts. To make it convenient for the students and parents, we install a Touch Pay Kiosk in the school where they can top up the card. It can also be reloaded in many establishments including 7-11 convenience stores, Robinson’s Mall Business Centers, SM Mall Business Centers and all Smart Padala Center and Smart Jump Centers,” she adds.

 What is in it for the school? It makes them paperless. The attendance record gets saved on the school server. The canteen and bookstores also become cashless and there are no stolen or lost money among the students.

 Trisha Bernabe, a 10th-grade student from ESPS said that the card will make life as a student easier. “I can now quickly inform my mom that I’m at school already without texting her using my prepaid number which needs load.”

Moving forward, Kayanan says the target is to roll out the PayMaya School ID to as many schools as possible willing to go paperless and cashless on campus.

 “We also think that it is a good way to teach students financial literacy or a way to manage their money in a digital society,” Kayanan ends.