29 Nov Floor to our merchants: Camplus

Camplus is the leading provider of student housing in Italy, with a widespread presence throughout the country and beyond. How did its journey begin and how did it grow over time?

In 1980, a group of university students founded what has now become Camplus. The initiative started in the form of a cooperative that served as an intermediary between home owners and tenants. Within just two years, the cooperative reached 500 student members.

This provided a fertile ground to create something new in the Italian landscape: comprehensive student support, integrating educational aspects too. Soon after, our first college, as we conceive it, was established: a genuine residential experience where the guided community is the heart of Camplus life, the “plus” that makes it much more than just a place to stay.

Today, Camplus is the leading student housing provider in Italy, with over 10,000 beds in 16 Italian cities and 3 Spanish cities.

What are the main services offered to students and young professionals in your residences?

We offer flexible and tailored services designed for students, young professionals, and travellers for both short and long stays, within university colleges, residences, and apartments. Since a few years, we also have an hotel in Rome that is available to tourists. Another area we have focused on is catering; we have created Hum.us, our fast gourmet restaurant, which is already available in many of our residences.

How has your offering evolved in recent years, and what role have collaborations with public and private organisations played?

In recent years, Camplus has focused significantly on establishing university residences throughout Italy, creating beautiful, dynamic environments with particular attention to environmental and social sustainability.

Camplus is a founding member of The Conference of Colleges of Merit (CCUM), which includes 58 colleges and 4,500 students throughout Italy. This conference represents a virtuous example in terms of housing and training.

Camplus is also a founding member of Re.Uni, an industry association created just a year ago that brings together the main managers of student residences in Italy. Our founder and CEO, Maurizio Carvelli, serves as the president.

Our aim is to support talented students and those in need. To this end, we offer over 1,000 beds to students in need from the rankings of the Right to Study Entities. Furthermore, we have numerous collaborations with American universities that choose us for our comprehensive and service-rich offering.

We are also pleased to host youth teams from Bologna, Turin, and Venice Football Clubs, choosing to have their young talents live in our residences, where they receive guidance to help them both in their studies and life off the pitch.

Let’s talk about Camplus and MyBank: what motivated you to expand your online payment options and integrate MyBank? In what context is it used?

One of the main needs we wanted to fulfil by integrating MyBank was to offer a broader range of payment methods, allowing students and parents to choose the most convenient and secure option. MyBank has thus been made available on Camplus Pay, our internal payment service.

Clients can access their private area, where they can view all outstanding payments and review the history of payments already made. At the time of payment, they can choose which instalment they wish to pay (also more than one) and then select their preferred payment method.

Integrating MyBank has proven to be a strategic investment to improve Camplus’s payment services, not just from the user perspective. MyBank has also brought significant improvements to our internal processes. In particular, the automatic reconciliation of account statements required considerable time and resources, whereas we have now optimised our reporting processes, drastically reducing the operational time dedicated to these activities. This allows us to allocate human resources more efficiently and focus on more strategic activities for Camplus.

What features of MyBank, in your opinion, lead students and other beneficiaries of Camplus services to choose it as a payment method?

MyBank is undoubtedly very useful as it offers a solid alternative to card payments, enabling users to make payments directly through their online banking services. This is a significant advantage because transactions take place in an environment students and parents are already familiar with, perceive as secure, and trust.

Beyond the protection of personal data, which is not shared with third parties, its ease of use is appreciated: with MyBank, users select their bank from the payment button and are redirected to their home banking.

The efficiency of this solution lies in users finding a fully pre-filled transfer with all necessary details, such as amount, beneficiary, and reason, thus eliminating the risk of errors when manually entering data. The transaction is approved with a single click, generating an immediate confirmation notified within seconds to both the payer and us at Camplus.

Lastly, I would say the absence of maximum transaction amount limits with MyBank also has some relevance, facilitating payments of higher amounts (e.g., if users wish to pay multiple instalments at once).

To what extent has MyBank improved your payment management?

As already mentioned, MyBank has supported us in offering a payment method alternative to the already available ones, thus improving the payment experience for students and parents. The experience is also positive from Camplus’ perspective: purely from a technical standpoint, I can say that it is quite uncommon to have minimal maintenance requirements when it comes to payment transactions, and with MyBank, most operations run particularly smoothly. Hence, we aim to increase volumes to achieve a more competitive commission value over time.

What are Camplus’s future objectives in terms of expansion and service offering?

A few months ago, we announced a joint venture that will see us expanding into France for the first time. The goal of this project is to further grow through a pan-European student housing platform. At the same time, we work to reach those Italian university hubs where we are not yet present, particularly in southern Italy, and to strengthen our presence in cities with a strong university focus, where we are already established.