international education

A different way to do business

Beat your competition. Start agreeing real-time commission deals. [4 min read]

Subscribe

Subscribe

In hundreds of conversations with institution and agent leaders since 2022, one question has dominated:"What exactly does Feezy do?"

The answer's not complicated, but what we offer is different.

TL;DR: it’s a platform enabling agents and education providers to create proactive, granular ‘deals’ instead of relying solely on passive, monolithic contract terms.

First the why

Traditional agent agreements aren’t good for many sector entities. They prevent agility, for example when a university heavily reliant on India or Nigeria has to pivot quickly. And they fix institution costs and OpEx artificially high, thanks to the perverse incentives they create.

When we book flights, we don’t pay the price set 2 or 3 years ago, we pay market rates at that moment in time. Supply & demand levels inform the price we each pay. Pre-2020 at least, this could often lead to pleasant surprises. 

Yet in international education, billions in commission is paid globally each year based on a decades-old contracting approach that offers zero responsiveness to shifting student supply or institution demand. This causes stagnation within the ecosystem and inefficiency in institutions’ end-to-end recruitment operations. Chief among the causes is that traditional contracting keeps every agent’s terms siloed & hidden from other agents.

Digitally agree deals based on your organisation's need that day, rather than what you think it might be in 3 years’ time, and you improve your outcomes. And it’s about more than revenue; agreeing terms this way gives institutions and agents access to students their competitors would otherwise secure, and can turbocharge institutional diversification.

It takes you from one of thousands of competitors passively & expensively sourcing, to a differentiated recruiter actively and efficiently prospecting.

The platform is cloud-based and takes 5 minutes to set up

We’ve built it based on users’ and sector practitioners’ feedback, and it offers three ways for agents and institutions to agree commission:

 

Feezy sales methods

 

Intake dates are specified and institutions can opt to restrict citizenships that can be enrolled by agents into programs; e.g. by making a listing open only to Sri Lanka, or to both Kenya & Uganda, or to all LatAm markets. Et cetera. Agents can do the same when creating listings, for example offering to recruit from their key source markets or only into their preferred destination markets:

 

Agent interface example

 

And institutions have full control of which agents see which listings. This may be some or all of their partners, or agents operating in markets from which they seek more students:

Institution choice example

Why give this control? Because today it’s common for any agent to be able to source to any program, and it’s this that helps diminish institutions’ load & application control. For institutions’ executive readers, this is why a decent amount of your risk in this space exists.

Meanwhile, your standard recruitment operations continue as well. Feezy doesn't replace what you do, it augments.

What are the use cases?

There are around a dozen, including the biggest potential wins for institutions: 

    • direct cost reduction (i.e. commission);
    • associated OpEx spend reduction;
    • diversification of classrooms; and
    • greater control of application load.

Institution users may want to start with smaller test cases:

    • improving the agent-acquired apply>enrol conversion rate from India or Indonesia; or
    • cutting visa declines from riskier markets by asking some agents there to pre-agree programs for which they can submit applications.

For institutions refreshing their agent pools, Feezy also offers a great way to track the performance of agents on probation, or to give bottom decile performers last chances.

And Faculties and Colleges may prefer to stop perennially sweating load targets for tougher-to-fill courses, like the Social Sciences. There are relatively few global prospects for this study area, so it is better to be the active and efficient hunter. ‘More marketing’ and increased overseas trips just won’t cut it. It's simply not sustainable.

What Feezy is not

This could be a long list, but most saliently:

    • an agent management tool (many of these exist already);
    • an agent;
      • we take zero commission, do not sign agreements, and do not engage prospective students;
    • an aggregator, for same reasons as above; or
    • an admissions platform.

Up Next

From February 2024, agents and institutions will be able to work with each other when not currently partnered or contracted, thanks to our in-platform due diligence feature. So, if you’re an education provider looking for high-quality agent partners in the markets from which you wish to grow intakes, receiving proactive offers to recruit students is a far better way versus sifting hundreds of speculative cold approaches from prospective agents. And vice-versa for agents.

Are you an innovator? Not wedded to the current market dynamic?

Then click here:

 

We’re onboarding more users from this month and by giving us a few details we can give you a heads-up when we’re ready for you.

Similar posts

Subscribe to our blog content

We'll notify you when new content is published.