On Dec. 7, NYU Abu Dhabi suspended services with its long-standing payment processor, Wirecard. The email from Student Finance announcing this substantial change arrived on Nov. 30, just a week before the cut-off deadline, leaving students scrambling and in uncertainty about their funds.

There are a myriad of reasons why Student Finance’s timing of the suspension managed to strike as both overdue and rushed. Wirecard, a German fintech company by origin, became the center of one of the biggest financial fraud scandals in recent history this June. With billions of euros missing from its checkbooks, it collapsed spectacularly, filing for insolvency and having senior executives arrested. NYUAD was aware of this and even published a notice on the Student Portal on June 26, addressing concerns that banks would soon stop accepting students’ cards and reassuring everybody that their funds were secure.

This would have been the perfect time for the university to look for a new payment provider and begin the transition process. It was summer, far away from the next stipend disbursement, and only a few students were on student assistantship payrolls. But they did not act, or if they did, they did not inform the student body. They did not mention Wirecard again for months, despite periodic student reports of ATMs and banks refusing their cards. Moreover, major changes were made to stipend disbursement, but for reasons unrelated to Wirecard’s bankruptcy.

That is until Student Finance suddenly announced the impending switch at the end of November. Though they have ostensibly found the new provider already, as per the email, no details were shared about this entity, which makes Student Finance’s progress on the matter questionable. Not to mention that despite whatever progress they might have made, the transition would nonetheless take six to eight weeks.

This is the wrong time to make such an impactful change. The beginning of December is the start of the holiday season when most people spend more money than usual. And even the lower estimate, six weeks, cuts into the second half of January, past the Spring 2021 arrival window. While NYUAD has officially invited everyone back to campus for the next semester, these disruptive changes to students’ finances will make returning more difficult. The pandemic has brought steeper costs to international travel: flights are rarer and more expensive, Covid-19 tests often cost substantial amounts, as does quarantine. Student Finance’s temporary solution is to transfer all newly earned money to students’ personal bank accounts throughout the transition period. But the benefits of this are largely restricted to student assistants, who get paid monthly for their work. The rest of the student body is left with a frustrating gap in their financial security. It also raises the question that if direct transfers to bank accounts were a valid option, why did Student Finance not institute it earlier, if they had indeed been preparing for the switch for a while?

More ominous, still, is the fact the office recommended withdrawing everything from the Wirecards as the best option during the transition period. Despite saying later in the email that leftover funds would be carried over to the new accounts, this did not give students much confidence in the future security of their university-provided funds. This semester is an especially inopportune time to suggest such a thing. There are currently hundreds of students spending the semester off-campus, scattered around the world. Not everyone was able to take out their money on such short notice before the university extended the deadline, to Dec. 16, after the initial deadline had already passed. Without this extension, these students would have been left in limbo for potentially months, cut off from a major source of funds.

Recent graduates, whose Wirecards were still valid, were in an even worse place before the extension. They were given no other option but to withdraw everything, as they will not be included under the new provider. One student who managed to do so lost a lot of money because of severe withdrawal fees and currency conversion rates. Another said that her alumna sister could not withdraw before the first deadline and thought that she had lost thousands of dirhams.

Student Finance has given the students of NYUAD a single piece of communication so far — the email on Nov. 30. That is not enough. It leaves too many questions unanswered. Who will be this new provider? And, perhaps more importantly, how will the new system function? The stipend changes have already stifled students’ freedom with their money — should they expect further restrictions? The Gazelle’s News Desk has reached out to Student Finance for a comment on the situation multiple times since October — only getting an answer on Dec. 10.

In that email, Student Finance claimed that Wirecard had initially informed them that they would support NYUAD students till the end of the calendar year. This timeline was changed at short notice, with Wirecard informing Student Finance on Nov. 30 that their operations would close down by Dec. 7. Nonetheless, even with the initial Wirecard timeline until the end of the calendar year, the new prepaid card would still only have arrived in late January, leaving students in limbo.

Since its foundation, NYUAD has prided itself on its generous financial aid to students who need it. The way this otherwise necessary change is being handled — the abruptness, the exclusion of graduates, the lack of communication — puts a considerable dent in that reputation.