UBC’s Digital Payment Program to replace ePayment

UBC’s ePayment system, which allows participating UBC departments/merchants to process financial transactions online, is due to be retired alongside the Student Information System (SIS).

Why is this happening?

ePayment, also known as the Consolidated Billing Module (CBM), is a custom-built solution that has been serving the university since 2002 as our enterprise solution for acceptance of online payments such as credit card, Interac Online, pre-authorised debit, and international wire. ePayment was written into the code of SIS and will therefore need to be decommissioned alongside SIS as the university transitions to Workday Student.

The Digital Payment Program (DPP) project team is currently undertaking an RFP to find a suitable vendor to provide equivalent functionality, including: acceptance of customer and student payments digitally, provision of a central administrative portal to manage merchant access and provide reporting capability, as well as automatic posting of transactions to Workday Finance and Workday Student.

Who will be affected?

This transition to a new third-party solution will impact a broad base of campus merchants who currently use ePayment to collect payments digitally from both students and non-student customers. Every faculty has a business unit using ePayment, either via the Web Service or a Virtual Terminal.

The plan is to transition cohorts of ePayment merchants in waves over a 12–18 month period through FY23 and FY24. For example, all ePayment/ePly merchants could be transitioned in one wave during summer 2023. A detailed transition plan will be developed in the coming months.

What does this mean for you?

During implementation all existing website links to the ePayment payment gateway will need to be replaced and integrations to various support systems, to which payment information is passed, will need to be retrofitted.

This technical work and testing will need to be planned for and paid for by individual business units and included in business unit budgets and work plans over the next couple of years. The DPP Project Team will provide central support for training merchants and testing.

What’s next?

More information will follow over the next couple of months and the DPP team will be in touch to help determine effort and cost and understand individual use-cases. In the meantime, if you have any questions about the project please contact IT Senior Project Manager Ivano Nichele at Ivano.Nichele@ubc.ca.