PayPal, Venmo Tambahkan Pembayaran Kuliah pada Platform Kampus

PayPal (PYPL ) dan Venmo kini dapat diterima untuk pembayaran uang kuliah dan biaya di perguruan tinggi AS melalui integrasi dengan tiga platform yang menjalankan portal pembayaran kampus: Illumia, Nelnet Campus Commerce, dan TouchNet, sebuah perusahaan Global Payments (GPN ). Opsi-opsi ini sudah aktif di sekolah-sekolah termasuk Bellarmine University, Butler University, Kansas State University, Michigan State University, dan Texas Tech University, PayPal mengumumkan pada 19 Agustus 2026.

Struktur kesepakatan lebih penting daripada jumlah logo. PayPal tidak menandatangani universitas satu per satu; ia menyematkan diri ke dalam processor yang sudah berada di antara sekolah dan pembayar mereka. Nelnet Campus Commerce melayani lebih dari 1.100 institusi pendidikan tinggi, Illumia menggerakkan pembayaran dan sistem kampus di lebih dari 10.000 institusi di bidang pendidikan tinggi, perawatan kesehatan, dan senior living, dan TouchNet menggambarkan dirinya sebagai pemimpin pasar dalam teknologi perdagangan pendidikan tinggi. Setiap sekolah yang mengaktifkan opsi ini mengarahkan pembayaran bernilai tinggi dan frekuensi rendah melalui checkout bermerk PayPal alih-alih formulir kartu mentah atau transfer ACH.

Tuition is a five-figure transaction, and it now clears with whatever funding source the payer already keeps in the wallet: bank account, credit card, or PayPal or Venmo balance. That mix determines which layer of the payments waterfall PayPal captures. Balance- and bank-funded payments carry minimal funding cost; card-funded tuition generates interchange payable to the issuer while PayPal keeps its merchant fee spread. The announcement does not state what schools or processors pay per transaction, and PayPal did not disclose pricing for the integrations.

A Distribution Deal Fourteen Months in the Making

The tuition push is the consumer-facing half of a campus strategy PayPal opened in Juni 2025, when it signed multi-year agreements with the Big Ten and Big 12 conferences to distribute institutional revenue-share payments to student athletes through its platform. That release named tuition acceptance as a stated goal, with PayPal positioned as “a preferred payment partner for tuition payments at select schools” and a launch targeted for early 2026. The 19 Agustus 2026 announcement is that plan reaching production, roughly seven months past the original window.

Between the two announcements, Venmo spent the 2025–2026 school year building the consumer side of the funnel: NIL partnerships with student athletes, college-branded debit cards, student ambassador programs, and gameday activations. The 26 Juni 2025 release said athlete payments would begin that summer, campus sponsorships in the 2025-2026 school year, and tuition payments in early 2026.

The Volume and Take-Rate Context

The tuition channel lands against a specific financial backdrop from PayPal’s second-quarter 2026 results, filed 28 Juli 2026:

• Total payment volume: $486.4 billion, up 10% year over year
• Transaction revenues: $7.8 billion of $8.7 billion in net revenue
• Transaction margin dollars: $3.9 billion, up 1%; $3.6 billion excluding interest on customer balances, up 3%
• Transaction expense rate: 0.90% of total payment volume; transaction and credit loss rate: 0.08%
• Transaction margin: 44.9% of net revenue, down from 46.4% a year earlier

Management’s Q2 commentary put Venmo’s total payment volume growth at 14% year over year, a seventh consecutive quarter of double-digit growth, with Pay with Venmo volume up 44% — the fastest-growing branded experience in the portfolio. Venmo debit card monthly active accounts rose more than 50%, and customers using both the debit card and Pay with Venmo generate more than nine times the average revenue per account of peer-to-peer-only users, according to the company’s earnings call. That cohort has roughly doubled in size over the past year.

Tuition fits the same monetization frame: it is a branded checkout payment — the segment whose growth stabilized at 2% currency-neutral last quarter — riding on Venmo’s engagement engine, the segment compounding at mid-teens volume. Whether it moves reported numbers depends on adoption across “thousands of colleges and universities” the three processors collectively serve. Nelnet’s partner page markets the integration to schools with a claimed 20% improvement in on-time payment rates and a 400-million-active-account reach, figures drawn from PayPal internal data the page footnotes.

Who Owns the Rails

The counterparty list doubles as a map of who processes campus payments in the U.S. TouchNet is owned by Global Payments, per the PayPal announcement’s own description of the company; Illumia, formerly Transact + CBORD, is a business unit of Roper Technologies (ROP ). Two of the three platform owners are themselves public payments companies, meaning PayPal’s branded button now sits inside checkout flows operated by firms that compete with it elsewhere for merchant acquiring volume.

PayPal mengatakan peluncuran terus berlanjut di sekolah-sekolah terpilih sepanjang tahun, dengan lebih banyak institusi diperkirakan bergabung seiring berjalannya tahun akademik.