Every treasurer knows the feeling: it’s the start of a new semester, the chapter needs to collect dues, and the spreadsheets have become a random assortment of nonsensical numbers. Half the members claim they paid through Venmo, while nobody can confirm whether the payment went through to the right account. The treasurer is left to chase down dozens of people individually, while due collection platforms take hundreds of dollars in revenue from clubs. By any reasonable standard, it is “a nightmare,” and for Santiago Schmitt, it was a nightmare that launched a company that promised to reshape the entire landscape of modern financial technology on campuses across the globe.
Schmitt, the co-founder and CEO of Dueflow, served as treasurer of St. Elmo Hall at UVA. Entering the role as a new treasurer with limited prior finance experience, he observed directly the inadequate systems, which he deemed “predatory and absolutely inefficient.” In an interview, Santiago claimed that “every single person [he] spoke to, every fraternity treasurer, every club finance chair, had the exact same problem, and there was no solution to it.” His idea was to build one.
Dueflow is an all-in-one treasury management platform designed from the ground up, “by treasurers, for treasurers.” The platform handles due collection, member tracking, merchandise and event sales, reimbursements, and financial reporting in a single interface without the presence of monthly fees, per-member charges, and hidden costs, all while integrating AI in its platform. For any treasurer who has spent a semester lost in the intricacies of an Excel file, Dueflow is the product that will change everything.
Schmitt grew up in London and began building technology startups at age 15. His first venture, an online grocery platform called Food Lama, scaled to 10,000 monthly users before he relocated to the US for university. When he arrived at UVA and took on the treasurer role at St. Elmo, he found himself face-to-face with the same dysfunction plaguing student organizations across the country.
“People don’t pay. It’s too difficult to,” he stated. “I’ve got spreadsheets, I’ve got to chase people down, I don’t know if they have paid, they don’t know if they have paid, and it truly becomes a mess.” The legacy platforms in place to address these issues only exacerbated the problem, in Schmitt’s assessment. One incumbent in the space, he noted, generates roughly $2.5 billion dollars, built largely on per-member fees that threaten to consume as much as 15% of everything a chapter collects. Instead of solving the issue, these legacy platforms were profiting from it.
Schmitt reached out to Charlie Meyer, whom he described as an “absolute wizard” and instrumental in scaling Dueflow. Together they began building, and the result of that partnership generated a platform that facilitated transactions in a manner that Schmitt had dreamt the legacy platforms could do, without the preposterous and excessive fees.
Onboarding for Dueflow takes roughly five minutes, as noted by a journalist at The Jefferson Independent who attempted the process. A treasurer uploads the chapter roster, organizes members into groups, sets payment amounts, and the platform does the rest. Automated email and SMS reminders go out on a set schedule and stop the moment a member pays, removing the chase from the Treasurer’s job description. The organization’s bank account links directly to the backend, and Dueflow never touches the money itself, allowing the funds to flow directly to the chapter.
Schmitt explained how “all the tracking, all the chasing, all the hardest parts of being a treasurer, are in effect, removed from the process” while expediting the transfer of money to an unprecedented scale.
The fee structure reflects this philosophy of simplicity, fairness, and innovation. Rather than extracting thousands in member charges or percentage-based commissions, Dueflow charges a flat processing fee depending on transaction size, a minimal figure that includes both the actual credit card processing cost and a lean profit margin of roughly $2 to $3 per transaction. Traditional platforms, by contrast, can capture roughly $80 per transaction, effectively “scamming” thousands of organizations across college campuses around the world. Chapters that have made the transition to Dueflow have reported collection rates jumping to 95% from a little over 60%, while saving thousands of dollars in platform fees.
The platform also recently launched Dueflow Shop, a built-in storefront enabling organizations to run merchandise sales, ticket sales, and event commerce in one centralized location. The typical alternative, a treasurer manually tracking individual T-shirt orders across a group chat while reconciling Venmo payments, is truly a nightmare, an opinion that resonates with treasurers across UVA and beyond. The Shop feature addresses that problem directly by consolidating every financial touchpoint of a student organization into one single dashboard, to facilitate a simple and efficient exchange dedicated to enhancing the experience for both the user and the treasurer.
However, Dueflow solves more than just financial problems. Every year, organizations transition their former treasurers to their new appointees, who often inherit a role for which they have virtually no training, alongside a pile of spreadsheets, disorganized records, and institutional knowledge that walked out the door with their predecessor.
Dueflow addresses this issue through a tiered access system. Viewers can browse the platform and monitor collections. Administrators can set dues and manage charges. Super administrators have the ability to change backend banking information. When the annual time to transfer leadership arrives, the outgoing treasurer sends an email invite, and the incoming officer inherits the complete account, including rosters, payment history, and all financial records instantaneously. “That’s as easy as changing a treasurer gets,” claimed Sam Cooper, the Head of Finance and Strategy at Dueflow.
Dueflow has also embraced the artificial intelligence revolution and integrated it throughout the platform’s architecture. Internally, the team utilizes an AI agent software connected to their payment infrastructure to analyze sales performance and optimize their own operations. For treasurers, the platform offers an AI chat function that allows users to query the chapter’s full financial history simply, without unnecessary fluff and hundreds of pages of reading. By commanding AI to surface payment trends, identify members with outstanding balances, and flag issues across dense records, the job of the treasurer is made simple.
In the coming weeks, Dueflow plans to expand its functionality so that a treasurer can instruct the chat assistant to execute a collection automatically. The vision is clear: a treasurer types “I need to collect $15 for T-shirts from these 20 people,” and the platform initiates the process without further input.
The numbers behind Dueflow’s growth speak for themselves. Their total payment volume (“TPV”), a financial metric measuring the gross dollar amount of transactions processed through a payment platform, has increased over 100-fold while the platform is active across more than 25 campuses, ranging from Toronto to Santa Clara, with approximately 80 organizations fully onboarded or in the process of joining. By the end of the year, Schmitt estimates the figure to reach around 100 campuses with the assistance of on-the-ground growth interns who have expanded the company’s onboarded organization count by thirty percent.
Furthermore, Dueflow recently closed its pre-seed funding round, bringing on a strategically assembled group of investors with deep experience in financial technology. Among them include the names behind financial titans like Revolut, the European neobank valued at over $100 billion, and a venture capital firm. They have also enlisted the help of UVA mentors such as the founders of Doorlist and Corner Juice.
Schmitt’s long-term ambition is to make Dueflow the standard for how Greek life organizations, club sports teams, cultural organizations, and other groups across American campuses collect dues and manage their financial responsibilities. Beyond higher education, Schmitt envisions the platform to eventually reach the half-million member based groups that exist across the US, and anywhere that someone without a financial background is being handed the keys to an organization’s treasury.
For any treasurer at UVA or in any college campus across the world still navigating dues season through Venmo or a spreadsheet, Dueflow’s pitch is straightforward: it was built by someone who sat where you are sitting and decided there was a better way.
Visit Dueflow at Dueflow.co or contact through [email protected].
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