An upgraded version of the OneDisburse^® Refund Management^® funds disbursement service will make refund disbursement more seamless for students and campuses – without offering loans or credit cards to college students. 

Colleges and universities will have access to a number of new features including:

• OneImport^SM data transfer – enables a campus to seamlessly transition from an internally managed direct deposit refund program to OneDisburse Refund Management
• OneReview^SM compliance service – an extension of Higher One’s Title IV compliance assurance
• OneDisburse PLUS^SM refund disbursement – eliminates the need for your business office to print checks for parent PLUS Loans

We value all opportunities to listen, share, and collaborate together with you. Earlier this month, we held the Higher One Users Group conference (HUG) and the experience and time spent with clients was invaluable. At the conference, a few of you mentioned that it seems impossible not to notice the significant changes in the financial services industry.  A lively discussion followed and some of you suggested you would appreciate more information on this topic and so I would like to share some thoughts.

Recently, the news media has been reporting on the rising costs of consumer banking, as the nation's largest banks boldly and unapologetically raise fees on checking accounts and related services. While many of these banks point to recent regulatory changes as the cause of new fees, I believe this is an over-simplified explanation of much deeper change.

For many years-decades in fact, customers of traditional banks got used to the idea of "free checking."  While it was not costless for traditional banks to provide checking account services, most traditional banks were content to subsidize the checking account with revenues they earned from other services like credit cards and installment loans.

Over the last few years, changes in the economic and regulatory environments have limited the revenues traditional banks may earn on credit cards and other loan products. Yet, little has materially changed in the way these banks provide deposit services for consumers. Most notably, these same banks are saddled with massive branch networks and the associated cost structure.

The CEO of one of the largest banks in America noted publicly that his organization spends more than $300 per year to support each basic consumer checking account. And, in reaction to some of the regulatory changes, this same CEO was famously quoted in The New York Times saying, "If you're a restaurant and you can't charge for the soda, you're going to charge more for the burger."

Today, as we have for the last ten years, we're taking a different approach at Higher One. We are enabling basic banking services in nontraditional ways for millions of college students. I can proudly say that since our founding, we have offered students a straightforward, no-nonsense banking experience. We power a full-featured optional checking account through our bank partner that millions of students find accessible, relevant and valuable; many students in fact use our services for free.

We can do this because, at Higher One, everyone is focused on efficiency. For us, it's not enough that we have eliminated the costs of sprawling branch networks, massive marketing budgets and the bureaucracies of traditional banks. We're always looking for new, less expensive ways to deliver quality services for you and your students.

Most importantly, through our bank partner, we continue to offer the OneAccount checking account with no monthly fee and no minimum balance requirement and we remain committed to offering the OneAccount as an option for any college student, regardless of credit or financial history.

We also know that students value transparency and choice and that they often have enough real-world experience to make smart decisions when given proper information. We have built our service around this reality with great success. The open communication surrounding our checking account's fee schedule for optional services (anyone can access it in one click on several websites) can invite scrutiny. It even makes some uncomfortable, as people are not accustomed to financial institutions being so open on the subject of fees. Our goal is for our customers to understand the choices and make the one that's best for them.

We are passionate about serving you with High Touch Service^®. Our OneDisburse^® Refund Management^® funds disbursement service is cost-free for all students and is predicated on choice. For those students that choose the OneAccount, it's a great option and we appreciate how important it is for us to continually offer a significant value for students.

Thank you for your continued support.

Dean Hatton
President & CEO