Good morning from University of Washington,
I'm sure many of you experienced the notification about the ending contracts with WorldPay and Windcave. Has anyone in this group switched to Tessitura Merchant Services or in the process of switching to Tessitura Merchant Services? I was wandering if we can schedule a discussion Zoom meeting about the pros and cons of switching over to TMS and the how the process works. We are currently still contracted with Windcave and are living in fear of the dreadful notification of our contract ending since we would have to jump through many hoops to switch to something else being a state run university. My colleagues and I would like to hear from you about to what to expect.
Hi Amber,We're in a similar situation at CU-Boulder, and waiting for the shoe to drop. I'd love to get additional perspectives on this matter. I know I'm "in transition" out of being a community coordinator, but if there's significant interest in this topic I'd be happy to help organize a more general meeting time.
I don't have a lot of perspectives, we're still on Windcave. However, we have successfully cleared TMS with the campus, and hope to begin scheduling conversations soon. They are very busy! We're hoping to have the scheduling conversations in a couple of weeks and have been told that we'll likely be looking at late Q1 2024. If you're in suspense on when those contracts might end, you definitely need to have a potential TMS contract cleared by your institution ASAP, and in our case that ASAP from start to finish was many months.
At UCB they're moving to do security reviews of every vendor contract that comes up, beyond the usual contract reviews, and as a result our security review team is completely overwhelmed, and this has caused us a lot of grief on other Tessitura-related contracts because of delays and confusion, so be sure to review the timing of all such contracts you have so that you can adequately prepare. And be prepared to push back if reviews come back negative or with reservations or just take too long.
Ha, I just saw "Janet Herrington is typing". Listen to what she has to say!
The UC Berkeley consortium is in the process of moving to TMS. We survived a review from campus vendor security but still need to move it along the purchasing chain. We are not planning to implement until next February or March (FYI, TMS is scheduling that far out). Adam Grigsby at TMS is great to work with and he's given a few presentations for other Tessitura community groups.
I literally just submitted a ticket yesterday asking more about Windcave, cause we are also having issues convincing our University to switch to TMS(though hearing that some of you have successfully conquered that hurdle is good to know). The only notifications about Windcave I could find was that they were ending their relationship with First Data, not that Tessitura and Windcave were parting ways. We use TSYS which is still listed as an accepted acquirer for Windcave. Does anyone know if Tessitura has a planned sunset date for Windcave?
I suggest reaching out to your Windcave account manager. At least to hear firsthand about any changes. After last year's announcement, and subsequent panic, about the Windcave-First Data relationship ending we ended up needing a meeting with Windcave, our controller's office and BofA to get clarity on what exactly was changing.
What Gawain said about the tortuous vendor security review process.
Yes we use First Data for our PCI compliance which is why we are scared.
Hi all!
Just wanted to give a quick update that we will be arranging an official TMS meeting for the Universities Group soon! Be thinking of any questions you may have surrounding TMS. Thank you Amber for getting this conversation started, and thank you all for your thoughtful replies!
-Olivia A.
Thanks Olivia! In the meantime, the Payments and Transactions community group has secured the ever-popular Adam Grigsby for their meeting on the 22nd:
community.tessituranetwork.com/.../1342