ePayments Corp., a leading electronic payments processing and support services company, has announced the launch of a new division to serve the education marketplace, specializing in school nutrition programs for grades K through 12. ePayments CEO Paul Lufkin said the new Educational Financial Services division will provide payments processing and RCK electronic check collection services nationwide. The services will help school districts and the many organizations and activities associated with education process checks more cost efficiently and collect non-sufficient funds (NSF) check payments.

"Thousands of school lunch programs around the county have a serious problem with bad check collection," said Lufkin. "But with tight budgets, they can't afford the cost of traditional debt collection services. That's where our Educational Financial Services team comes in and offers them away out with our free, electronic and non-invasive recovery service."

The ePayments lunch program check guarantee offers a 100 percent guarantee on recovering the full value of current-school-year bad checks.

"Unlike other organizations, school lunch programs can't just write off bad check debt at the end of the year," said Lufkin. "It's a time consuming and costly recovery process, which puts many of these programs in a really tough situation."

ePayments specializes in working with schools, non profits, governments and companies of all sizes that handle payments in the form of check and credit card transactions. Since U.S. banking system rules were changed to allow businesses to use the Automated Clearing House network (ACH) and Check 21 methodologies to electronically process checks from customers, a new industry of providers has emerged to support businesses with electronic check conversion, electronic NSF collection and related compliance services.