Paymerang CARES Distributes Over $7 Million in Refunds to Students

On March 27, the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act was passed by Congress with overwhelming, bipartisan support and signed into law as a necessary step to get relief to students, workers, and families throughout the country.

The roughly $2 trillion stimulus package responded to the shutdown of businesses and schools nationwide, as well as millions of job losses, due to the novel coronavirus pandemic.

The CARES Act provided $14.25 billion for emergency relief to institutions of higher education to respond to the coronavirus. Of these funds, 90% was allocated to colleges and universities based primarily on their share of students receiving the Pell Grant.

The Department of Education released a table with allocation amounts for each institution.

At least 50% of these funds were earmarked as emergency aid to students who had their semester disrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic. Emergency aid can include anything under a student’s cost of attendance, such as food, housing, course materials, technology, health care, and childcare. Once funds were received by colleges and universities, they were responsible for distributing the emergency aid to students.

Through our Paymerang CARES program, we were able to help our higher education clients quickly disburse these payments to students. Our education clients were able to send simple, digital CARES Act payments to students with zero disruptions to their existing processes. Most importantly, these payments were sent electronically and delivered directly to students. 

94% of all payments were distributed electronically

To send the secure eChecks faster and more securely, all our higher education clients had to do was upload their CSV file, fund the payments, and mark the items as paid! This simple and straightforward process allowed us to provide our clients with a quick resolution to distributing their funds.

Paymerang CARES payments were sent directly to student email addresses to ensure direct delivery to students. Once students received the funds, they had multiple deposit options: print from home and deposit personally or using mobile deposit, direct deposit via ACH (eDeposit), or deposit to a Visa debit card. 

14,000 students nationwide were able to receive their funds more quickly and more securely

We were proud to offer this program to our clients and help alleviate some of the unforeseen circumstances caused by the pandemic.

You can click here to learn more about Paymerang CARES.

Brian Cook

Brian Cook

As Vice President at Paymerang, Brian Cook brings over 19 years of experience working with various educational procurement and consortia programs designed to lower the cost of delivering high quality education, provide efficiency gain, and protect institutions against the proliferation of fraud. He leads the partnerships with several associations and coalition procurement programs for Paymerang and will identify as well as sharing best practices on reducing exposure to common compliance and fraud problems that plague institutions today.