Neon

A system that helps K-12 schools automate their entire payment processes.

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Inspiration

For many people when they hear the future of payments the first thing that comes to their minds is crypto, blockchain, or decentralization. But the true future of payments is automation. Many businesses find it hard to scale not because they couldn’t accept payments. Accepting payments was the easy part but automating payments came with a lot of challenges. And the only alternative was to do it manually. One such example is K-12 schools (Secondary schools and Primary schools). Regardless of how the school fee was paid, you have to generate a receipt and send it to the school. Then the school had to confirm and put it down in their books. A very time-consuming process. If the school wanted to generate a list of defaulters they have to go into their books and manually draw up a list of people that have not paid. Another time-consuming process. If the school had other services like lunch that was optional that kicks off a whole other round of manual processes. This model suffers from the high cost of hiring staff to manage all the manual processes, high errors, slow processes, and general frustration among staff and parents.

Solution

We built a system called Neon that automates the school’s entire payment system. Neon supports the schools all the way from the beginning. With Neon, schools can create a customized website that has the school's colors, logos, slogans, and details. Their students would be able to log in through this website. The schools can upload a CSV file of their students to ensure security. After this, the schools would be able to set a variety of payment plans and options with full customization support. So schools can set parts of the school fees that are optional, for example. Lunch, excursions, uniforms, gyms, pools, and so on. What this means is, every student can now pay entirely different school fees giving the schools a big opportunity for growth. Schools also have the ability to set payment options. Students can decide to pay in installments or pay annually. With all these added functionalities schools have a dashboard where all the automation takes place. They can easily track a student's status and filter students by payment plans and custom parameters. So if the school needs the list of Jss 2 students that paid for lunch. It would be as easy as setting the filters and getting the list in less than 5 secs.

Target Market

We would target K-12 schools (Secondary schools and Primary schools) that are operating in Africa. Beginning our operations in Nigeria.

Benefits/Value proposition

We are providing the schools with an extra way to make money by saving on hiring costs. We are also giving schools the opportunity to grow and scale their businesses through error-free, fast processes. We also help drive customer loyalty and trust by assuring parents of a more seamless payment management method.

Go to Market/Implementation

Our go-to-market strategy would be to target schools in Nigeria that fall under our target market. We would target mid to large schools with a large number of students. These would be the schools that would be the easiest to convert because of the number of manual processes that can be automated and costs that can be cut almost immediately. We would also target private schools, to begin with.

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