Pay your school or college fee sitting anywhere and anytime with FeePal

Do you remember the long queues most of us stood in to pay our school or college fees? So, let me tell you with FeePal paying school or college fee is only a click away.

Launched in July 2014, FeePal brings a change to that mundane way of paying fees. FeePal is an online educational product and services marketplace. With FeePal, users can deposit institute funds anytime and from anywhere, and collect receipts for these transactions on real time basis. Educational institutes can sign up with FeePal at ‘zero’ cost for which they are provided a link where the institutes collect their fee, sell and manage admission forms, sell educational products and conduct tests online.

Based in Delhi, Ankur Sharma and Pooja co-founded FeePal to provide users a hassle-free automated financial transaction platform in the education sector.

“During an e-commerce assignment we closely worked with some of the renowned coaching institutes in Delhi. We came to know about the hardships and hassles that the payers and educational institute have to face in the manual financial transactions. We realised that there is a huge scope of automating the financial transactions in the education sector and a business model based on technology can prove disruptive,” says Ankur.

Given that India is one of the largest educational markets, Ankur and his team hope to change the paradigm of financial transactions taking place in the educational institutions. FeePal envisions simplifying work load and mitigating fund collection cost of the educational institutions by the stable technological interventions.

“Our interventions would tend to replace the manual and physical collection of funds in our partner educational institutes by digital and electronic medium. Our target market comprises pre-schools, schools, colleges, universities and coaching institutes,” adds Ankur.

The FeePal team brings a blend of experience and young blood. Ankur is a gold medallist in Business Administration from XIMB (Xavier Institute of Management, Bhubaneshwar), and was previously working in Mother Dairy as Area Sales Manager. He also holds a Bachelor’s Degree in Electronic Engineering. Ankur learned the art of ‘lean management’ while working with a startup in digital marketing and e-commerce development.

Pooja has a Master’s Degree in Computer Application from University of Rajasthan. She has worked with Department of Information and Technology (DOIT), Government of Rajasthan. At FeePal, Pooja leads the technical team, product development, quality assurance, product improvement, data security and customer services.

The team also consists of Dr Alok Chauhan and Dr Rudresh Pandey who mentor institute acquisition and business strategy. Both the mentors come with a lot of experience in the education sector.

Educational institutes who are partnered with FeePal are charged a minimum convenience fee on every successful transaction. The company also takes care of the technical queries related to the online fee collection through its customer care centre. Thus FeePal, the e-commerce aggregator of partner educational institutes, provides a range of products to them.

• Fee Collection Ecosystem
• Online Admission Forms Selling
• Online Web Store
• Online Exam Platform
• Online Event Ticketing

FeePal, the five month old startup has a presence in more than 10 cities across India with more than fifty educational clients and have incurred gross transaction of about 1.4 crore. Currently bootstrapped, the company has three revenue streams.

1. Convenience fee- On every successful transaction of FeePal the payer incurs a convenience fee.
2.  Software Selling- The institutes that require advanced and customized solutions incur software selling.
3. Site Space Selling- On the basis of geographical targeting, FeePal categorizes institutes on the basis of city, locality and type.

The founder feels personal visit to educational institutes and direct sales are the best working marketing strategies for the company. But like any other startup, FeePal team faces a few challenges. One among them is sales cycle in educational institutes. Trust deficit from institutes is another problem that the company faces quite often.

Despite these challenges, Ankur is optimistic about the future. “We want our presence in maximum number of institutes in India and of course in the foreign market. We want to have the user base of millions of payers across the globe,” says Ankur.

FeePal team is working on mobile solutions and expects to come up with a mobile platform in the near future.

Website: FeePal