UC & US Bank Student Engagement Fund Awarded Projects

The University of California (UC) and U.S. Bank formed the Expanded Partnership Program in 2018, building on over a decade of collaboration in commercial card services. This program provides UC students with valuable internship opportunities both at U.S. Bank offices nationwide and on UC campuses, focusing on enhancing university operations and supporting campus initiatives.

Awarded Projects by Year

Every year, U.S. Bank awards up to $125,000 in Student Engagement Funds to various UC campuses, selected by a joint committee of UCOP and U.S. Bank representatives. This program offers students an opportunity to work with staff and faculty on paid internship projects to improve UC’s procure-to-pay systems, processes or programs while providing a unique experiential education opportunity.

Projects selected in 2024:

UC Santa Barbara ($9840): Procurement Card Business Process Optimization for Modernization – This project aims to prepare UCSB's internal systems and stakeholders for the launch of Oracle Financials Cloud in July 2025, focusing on optimizing Procurement Card business processes managed through the Jaggaer Procurement System.
UC Santa Cruz ($25,000): Card Program Expansion and Revenue Generation – This project intends to increase revenue generation at UCSC by analyzing operational spend data and redirecting payments from traditional methods (checks and ACH) to more efficient payment solutions such as Payment Plus, Instant Card, CTE-Cards, and P-Cards.
UC San Diego ($20,000): Chatbot Implementation for Integrated Procure-to-Pay Solutions (IPPS) – This project will implement a chatbot system within UCSD’s IPPS Department to streamline procure-to-pay, travel, and expense inquiries, enhancing customer service efficiency and user experience.

NOTE: The committee is still reviewing applications from UC Davis, UC San Diego, UC Irvine and UCSF. These projects propose P-card usage and analysis, supplier engagement strategies and payments, and campaigns to refocus travel and reimbursement spend to card program offerings. The remaining proposals will be awarded by August 2024, to meet deadlines for bringing on new interns.

Projects selected in 2023:

UC Davis: $17,600 – Kauli to Oracle Integration
UCLA: $17,000 – Captured Spend, Campus Centered, Consolidation-focused
UC San Diego: $18,000 – Departmental Business Reviews
UC San Diego Health: $16,000 – E-Invoicing Expansion
UC Santa Barbara: $6,300 – Purchase Card Expansion
UC Santa Cruz: $25,000 – Payment Card Use Expansion Team

Projects selected in 2022:

UC Davis: Virtual Card Aggie Enterprise Analyst - In 2021 the UC Davis Payment Plus program generated $95 million in spend and nearly $2 million in incentives that went directly back to the University. With our conversion from KFS to Oracle we must convert all existing Payment Plus suppliers into Oracle. This student intern will work with our Admin IT team to ensure that file data is accurate and up to date prior to conversion.
UCLA: P-Card Program Expansion - This project will focus on expanding and streamlining the P-Card program through initiatives and modifying the audit process. The project aims to divert allowable spend to the P-Card, increase cardholder and department card count, and improve operating efficiency by streamlining the P-Card Audit of the Sales/USE tax accrual process.
UC Merced: Procurement Card Expansion - UC Merced will expand the P-Card program by hiring three part-time student workers to assist in gathering and analyzing current P-Card spend data, maximizing P-Card process efficiencies, creating and integrating capabilities for automation in P-Card processes for our campus.
UC San Diego: Manual Payment Outreach - This project aims to review UCSD’s Proxy Pay efforts and identifying missed opportunities to capture spend and provide suppliers with the best payment method. The Manual Payment Outreach will bring value to the program by increasing enrollment to the virtual card program and thus creating revenue for the program as well as cutting costs on issuing check payments.
UC San Diego: Divert Out-of-Pocket Reimbursements to Card Products - UCSD identified that many reimbursed expenses could have been originally purchased with a Procurement Card or Travel & Entertainment Card. The goal of the project is to divert out of pocket reimbursements to a card product.
UC San Diego: Procure-to-Pay Certification - This project will design and develop a certification to educate campus on UC San Diego’s travel and entertainment & non-events processes (Travel & Entertainment Policies, Booking, T&E Card, Non-Events, and Reconciliation). This project aims to create a fully conceptualized and developed UC San Diego Travel & Entertainment Certification.
UCSF: Research Participant Payment Optimization - Supply Chain Management (SCM) will optimize and bring efficiencies to the UCSF research participant payment process. UCSF SCM is implementing a UCSF-wide reloadable card-based payment solution. UCSF departments will have direct access to a system where they can set up research participants, obtain approvals for payments, and issue payments quickly to research participants using reloadable cards. This solution will also eliminate the manual work on processing 4000 checks and check requests annually.

Projects selected in 2021:

UC Berkeley Vendoring Triage Project – This project will expand on previous year by identifying newly enrolled vendors that should be paid via physical card and via Payment Plus, and use data gathered to help drive UCB decisions.
UC Davis P-Card Data Analyst – Student will work with “AggieDash” to identify opportunities to grow the procurement card program. Student will work with Data Analytics team to identify departments not using the procurement card to pay vendors that accept credit card payment, extract data from AggieDash to support growth of P-card program, and ultimately increase spend of the P-card program.
UCLA P-Card/DB Card Expansion Project – This project will expand spend within the P-Card and DB card programs through outreach, marketing, program materials, direct campus communication and solicitations.
UC Merced Payment Plus – This project will implement an integrated Payment Plus program using Oracle AP to process payment files for suppliers. This funding supports hiring three part-time students to work on the Payment Plus campaign and the creation and integration of automated capabilities for Payment Plus transaction reconciliation.
UC San Diego STP COVID Relief for Small Business Partnerships – This project will evaluate the success of the STP COVID Relief Campaign and adoption rates from our small business focus group. Success will be determined by acceptance rates, amount of spend estimated, amount of spend actually captured once enrolled. Campaign results will determine if it is valuable and viable enough to be adopted moving forward.

Projects selected in 2020:

UC Berkeley Vendor Investigation & Payment Plus Expansion – This project utilizes student interns to analyze and investigate existing vendors to identify new opportunities for Payment Plus (specifically STP and Proxy Pay) utilization.
UCLA Card Programs Expansion Project – This project utilizes multiple student interns and will focus on expanding spend within UCLA Payment Plus and PCard programs through outreach, direct campus communication and solicitations.
UCSC Expanded use of CTE Cards, P-cards & Payment Plus – Leveraging two student interns, this project expands the use of CTE, Pcards and Payment Plus at UCSC through a combination of system, policy and process changes that will eliminate travel advances, improve controls and compliance, reduce costs and move the campus towards a full source-to-pay solution while increasing revenues generated through these programs.
UC San Diego P-Card Team – This project utilizes a student intern to support the continuity of select card programs as UCSD undergoes an Enterprise Systems Renewal. Additionally, the student will strategically target suppliers and work with them to convert payments to Ghost Cards, often in lieu of expensive check payments.

Projects selected in 2019:

UC San Diego Payment Strategy Communications Management – This project utilizes a student intern to develop strategic communication material and consistent messaging to ensure San Diego's internal and external clients have a thorough understanding of the campuses Payment Strategy.
UC Davis Virtual Card Specialist – This project utilizes a student intern to establish and maintain working relationships with assigned business accounts, serving as the main day-to-day contact between program administrators and relationship managers in order to help grow card program spend.
UCOP Revenue Process Reporting – This project utilizes a student intern to help design, develop and codify a reliable and replicable end-to-end business process to receive, route, monitor and report revenue generated by key UC procurement units.
UCSF P2P Process Optimization – This project establishes a paid student team to support UC San Francisco's Supply Chain Management (SCM) unit with initiatives focused on optimizing UCSF's procure-to-pay processes.
UC San Diego Virtual Card Supplier Services Optimization – This project utilizes a student intern to support the growth of UCSD's virtual payment program opportunities and the efficient management of outstanding payments.

Projects selected in 2018:

UC Merced Procure-to-Pay (P2P) Implementation – This project establishes a paid student team to support UC Merced’s major initiative to update its procurement systems. The project facilitates UC Merced’s adoption of an integrated and optimized Procure-to-Pay (P2P) model aligned with the "SupplyChain 500" (SC500) system-level initiative.
Student Talent Strategy at UC San Diego’s Integrated Procure-to-Pay Solutions (IPPS) – UCSD IPPS develops and launches a program to manage UC San Diego student employees in a coordinated way that benefits IPPS and clients, and enhances the student experience. It provides a path of progressive responsibility, opportunities to rotate among IPPS areas, and cross-functional projects that align with a student’s evolving academic and career goals.
UC San Diego Payment Compass – This project utilizes a student intern to support the onboarding of suppliers and payees to do business with the University using a new tool, Payment Compass, which helps payees sign-up for electronic invoice submission, virtual card payments, and also offers real-time payment status visibility.