• With hundreds of thousands of students reliant on NSFAS to assist with tertiary education each year, ensuring funds are accessed quickly remains vital.
• Recently Coinvest won the bid to handle the issuing of NSFAS payments for students, and it has since tapped Ukheshe to develop an easy to use platform to that end.
• Ukheshe then created a progressive web app built exclusively for students to receive their payments promptly.

The National Student Financial Aid Scheme (NSFAS) will prove key for hundreds of thousands of students gaining access to finding for their tertiary studies next year, with more than 690 000 students utilising it during the 2022 academic year alone.

Assisting in disbursing the NSFAS payments is Coinvest, which won a tender to do so, but it has tapped fintech enablement specialists Ukheshe to help with the process too. To that end, the pair have partnered on a progressive web app (PWA) that will make the access of NSFAS payments a bit more streamlined.

More specifically it will make receiving funds on NSFAS cards easier for students.

“An existing partnership between Ukheshe and Coinvest provided a full-scope mobile money management platform, using several Eclipse services including digital wallets, identity management (usernames and passwords), KYC, physical cards, virtual cards, and VAS delivered through a Progressive Web App (PWA),” explained Ukheshe in a press release sent to Hypertext.

“Given the large socio-economic disparities that exist in South Africa, this project underscores the power that pioneering payment solutions can have in democratising access to financial services for people who need them most,” added Anton Coertzen, Ukheshe CCO.

Given the scope of the project and the sheer number of students needed to be catered for, one you think that only using one service provider might present a hurdle, but according to Coinvest that has not been the case.

“Initially, we were unsure that one provider would be able to deliver all the solutions we needed for our diverse portfolio. However, Ukheshe’s competent team and their willingness to go the extra mile in support of anything that Coinvest throws at them has been a game changer. Such willingness to build together is not common in this industry,” pointed out Dr Artie MaCkelve, group CEO of Coinvest.

Given the added pressure of finding employment and dealing with other rising costs that come with tertiary studies these days, here’s hoping that Coinvest and Ukheshe keep the NSFAS payments process as smooth as possible for students in the coming academic year.