How Schoters Gets Indonesian Students Accepted In Top Universities, Powered By Aspire’s Multi-Currency Account

The Company: Jakarta based ed-tech company with international ambitions

Founded in 2017 and headquartered in Jakarta, Schoters was built to fulfill a dream一to help students from Indonesia gain acceptance into their dream universities, anywhere in the world. To prepare their students, they offer language courses, college registration services as well as overseas student accommodation.

Since then, this ed-tech startup has helped thousands of Indonesian students clinch coveted admission spots to 400 universities in 43 countries, including Harvard University, Cornell University and Nanyang Technological University.

The Challenges: Hampered by finance tools that are expensive for borderless companies

#1 Corporate card lacked flexibility for Schoters’s borderless, remote team

Despite being over 500-strong, the team at Schoters is very much remote-first. Team members are located all over Indonesia and even halfway across the world. This created problems when it came to making employee purchases as it was hard to keep track of everyone’s spending activities as it happens. The finance team needed a card that could scale as fast as their headcount growth.

However, the corporate card they used was limited as it did not allow instant usage and multiple card-holders. Without multiple cards to manage spends, employees had to use their personal funds and make a claim later on, adding to the finance team’s workload.

#2 Difficulty assigning and managing Budgets across departments

One of the common growing pains of managing the business finance of a rapidly growing team is having to oversee budgets for each department. Based on Schoters’s unique business model, their marketing and operations teams are the biggest spenders.

However, there is little visibility on how much both teams were spending due to their manual claim workflows. On top of that, there was a distinct lack of control. The finance team was notable to catch or prevent overspending until after it had happened.

#3 Racked up expensive FX fees

Part of Schoters’s business model is to make regular payments with student housing providers abroad to arrange accommodation for their students. Due to the high volume of FX transactions made, Schoters soon felt the pinch of accumulating rising FX fees. The team needed a cost-saving alternative that would enable them to make international payments without the high fees in order to protect their bottom line.