Poper corporation provides a service tool for tutoring schools, called Comiru. Their goal is to optimize service and internal operation processes for the tutoring school industry. They added a new feature which makes it possible to pay tuition fees by credit card in October 2017.

We sat down and spoke with Mr. Kurihara, the Chief executive officer of Poper Corporation, who is looking to tackle inefficiencies in the tutoring school industry with the power of technology. Mr. Kurihara goes through the decision-making process -- telling us why he decided to add the credit card payment function and the reason he chose to work with Omise.

Mr. Kurihara has had previous experience in running a tutoring school. Most of the internal operations of a tutoring school is still paper-based, and he realized that there is a real need for improvements. He founded “Comiru” to help tutoring schools and teachers better focus on their core business - teaching.

One of the major issues that Mr. Kurihara experienced first-hand during his tutoring school career is the cost of managing and collecting tuition fees.

"For a tutoring school, the teaching part is like the tip of the ice burg. There are many small functionalities and details behind running it. When dealing with tuition fees and payments, most of the transactions are account-to-account transfers. Some schools even collect tuition in cash. These cash-based processes are very costly. There are also many things that could go wrong with it, like for example the student losing the money or falling behind on payments. I thought that the solution to this is to introduce credit cards. That’s when we introduced credit card payment to Comiru.”

Working with a developer-first payment system

Since its inception, Poper has grown rapidly. Mr. Kurihara emphasizes that when choosing a payment system to work with, the sense of speed is key. For startups, we prefer systems that are easy for engineers to work with. So I chose a developer-first payment system that can be integrated smoothly. That’s where the relationship with Omise began.

Comiru has got its own dashboard which is tailored specifically to the tutoring school industry. By implementing with Omise’s Payment APIs, they are able to add payment-related services to their existing dashboard. Their users can manage tuition fees from the dashboard right away.

Introducing card payments to the tutoring school industry

After providing credit card payments, about 30% of users chose credit card payment in just one month. In addition, the company has received more inquiries regarding the introduction of Comiru, not only from the tutoring school industry but also from music schools and swimming schools. “About 20% of all inquiries we receive are related to card payments. Card payments are great for both parents and school administrators.”