Flywire Expands Payments Solutions To Hospitals

While much of Flywire’s (formerly peerTransfer) efforts have been focused on enabling payments cross-border for international students, it’s got another plan to expand its payments reach.

Serving international patients at 60 U.S. hospitals.

Flywire announced yesterday (March 23) a new sponsorship agreement with the U.S. Cooperative for International Patient Programs (USCIPP). Through the deal with this nonprofit organization, Flywire will be able to enable an easier way to pay bills in the U.S. health care system for international patients. The deal comes not longer after Flywire’s entry into the $40 billion international patient care industry, which was announced in Oct. 2015.

“USCIPP is pleased to welcome Flywire as a sponsor,” said Jarrett Fowler, program manager for USCIPP. “We selected Flywire as a partner in the payments category based upon their reputation for quality, payment expertise and service. These attributes are considered extremely important by USCIPP’s member institutions.”

USCIPP selected Flywire as one of only three sponsoring organizations, which was based on its ability to support the organization and its member health care providers. Through this deal, Flywire will sponsor USCIPP’s Annual Meeting next month in order to offer USCIPP members education and advice on streamlining international patient care payments.

“Flywire operates with the same level of integrity and dedication to patient experience as USCIPP and its member institutions,” said Mike Massaro, CEO of Flywire. “We look forward to supporting USCIPP, engaging with its members and helping to simplify the payment process for both international patients and the institutions that care for them.”

Flywire is most known in the market for its ability to solve a problem that sounds like it shouldn’t be much of one at all: helping students living in one country pay their school tuition (in full) for a school that happens to be in another. Now, it’s going to do the same but in the health care industry for those who need the same ease of paying medical bills.

Before services like Flywire came into the market, consumers in these markets were forced to get creative about getting money into the country to make international payments for tuition. Sometimes that involved bringing large amounts of cash in suitcases into the country. Alternatively, it was being forced to leverage traditional bank transfer solutions that were costly, took a long time for the school to receive and, once there, created a reconciliation nightmare for the school due to the number of “hops” and associated fees incurred along the way. 

As Flywire’s ambition to serve the global citizen has expanded, so has its platform. Flywire recently expanded its focus to include the burgeoning medical tourism market with the launch of a new cross-border payment solution for patients traveling overseas for medical care, which this new sponsorship announcement will help propel. Flywire hopes to transform cross-border medical payments in much the same way it did cross-border educational payments: providing speed, transparency, efficiency, payments and currency-agnostic payments services for the patient and ease of reconciliation to the medical institution.