5 Things We're Seeing As Agents Get More Serious About Compliance

john@feezy.io (John @ Feezy) — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 23:41:35 GMT

The international education sector’s push for improved compliance is laudable. It’s my firm belief that improvements driven from within the ecosystem are more likely to bring meaningful change than top-down regulation; the market can self-police effectively if the commercial disincentives to do the opposite are sufficiently strong.

Whilst most operators’ focus is on visa approval rates, or on streamlining application processes with AI, we’ve focused squarely on the very first step in the agent supply chain: contracts.

These are so often seen as administrative means-to-an-end by both sides of the market, yet they can define success or failure. This old blog post explains why.

Brief Context: What Feezy Does

Feezy uses AI to examine an agency’s partner agreements and display the key data in a way that makes accessing crucial information easier (here’s a 3 min example with a Navitas contract). Agents are reminded when contracts approach expiry, can set team-sharing permissions on each contract, and can add additional docs like bonus and incentive files. The aim is to ensure agency leaders know which providers owe them what commission, and to remain compliant.

These are just some of the universities whose partner contracts are securely managed by agencies in Feezy today:

What We’re Learning From Agents

1. Your "live" contracts might already be expired

Because Feezy’s AI displays the contract end dates (where these exist, which is in about 98% of cases), users can know in seconds when their agreements require renewal. Some have learned that a high percentage of their existing terms had lapsed, effectively rendering them non-compliant and risking any future commission payments. Most agents unearth at least a few ‘live’ contracts that actually lapsed some time ago.

One agency CEO added 192 agreements to Feezy and, within approx. 20 minutes, saw that 95 of these were out of term. It is a significant issue for any business to learn that half of its clients were legally null and void, and it should be noted that in this instance 95 providers were also out of contract (many of them CRICOS-registered Australian institutions for whom compliant contracting is legislated) and still processing applications and commissions re: this agency.

2. Bigger agencies are silently under-invoicing

Contracts are complex, lengthy documents often read and transposed (to Excel) by junior staff under time pressure. Misread a tier and this means potentially under-invoicing for years. One provider has told us of a c.$1.2M under-invoice figure discovered in an audit of a prior period's agent claims (and, no, it did not inform those agencies).

A large agency with effectively perpetual contracts learned that the incorrect tiers were marked against three agreements. Feezy’s AI parsed and determined these award rates and follow-on-commission values in seconds per agreement. These terms had been operating for years.

3. A multi-billion dollar sector still runs on Excel and email

We’ve met agencies with over fifty offices wholly reliant on Excel and email to manage commercial terms worth tens of millions in revenue a year. The business had grown and become much more sophisticated over decades, but the contract processes were unchanged.

Sometimes we hear “what’s wrong with using Excel?”, and the simplest answer is that it requires humans - who are prone to errors - to transpose data from lengthy legal documents accurately. Beyond this there are other limitations: no team-sharing, no auto-reminders, etc.

Even agencies with self-built CRMs - more common than we’d expected - say that contracts can’t be handled well, and fall back on manual data entry.

4. Humans are the loop

A $10B+ annual commission sector is largely held together by good people doing honest, busy work and tracking critical data manually across systems. Feezy’s not here to AI these people out of jobs; it can instead support these hardworking professionals to work faster and more accurately (always with humans in the loop).

Even renewing contracts can be a months-long task over a given year, sometimes involving many email chasers from shared inboxes (again mistakes happen). So we've digitised contract signing to cut this workload and prevent errors:

Agency leaders might ask if they owe their staff a failsafe or support mechanism for this complex, crucial work.

5. “We don’t need it”

We hear this a lot. Perhaps most agency leaders still do not yet realise why it’s worth safeguarding the documents that underpin their business.

The same agencies saying "no" to us might store these agreements insecurely and/or have no idea who in their business can see the commercial-in-confidence data within the files (made riskier by counsellor job-hopping). Were these agencies to be audited by partners, as all good university contracts permit at short notice, the results may not be great.

Plus, GDPR (and other relevant data sovereignty and privacy Acts) exposure is significant and largely unexamined.

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So here’s to self-regulating and ensuring the best and most compliant agencies rise to the top.

Questions? DM me on LinkedIn.

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5 Things We're Seeing As Agents Get More Serious About Compliance