NACCU New Member Highlight: FutureState
NACCU New Member Highlight:
FutureState
In this latest installment of our New Member Highlight, we catch up with Joe Harting, Co-Founder of new NACCU member, Future State.
Talk about the history of your company.
FutureState was born out of necessity, and a little frustration.
Our technology was born at the University of Arizona from decades of working in higher education both running and supporting campus credential programs and all the systems they interface with. After years of feeling locked-in by expensive legacy systems, we developed solutions designed to make it easier to adopt innovations like mobile credentials while also giving us the flexibility to bring in the systems best suited for our campus. The result was significant cost savings for the university and complete freedom from vendor lock-in.
The response from other institutions was immediately felt with the first question we were asked after presenting our approach: "Can we license this?"
Recognizing a need for innovative solutions that put universities in the drivers’ seat, we formed FutureState through Tech Launch Arizona – the University of Arizona’s technology commercialization office.
FutureState continues to challenge the market with incredibly user-friendly solutions, built on modern technology, and a promise to never hold university data hostage or resort to lock-in to retain business.
What does your company do?
FutureState provides a suite of products designed to empower universities to confidently run their credential and dining programs without proprietary lock-in. Designed inside higher education, specifically to serve higher education, our products are open, vendor-agnostic, and deliver a world-class user experience. FutureState's solutions leverage a modern codebase and cloud-first architecture, unconstrained by decades of technical debt. Through partnership, we lay a foundation so that dependencies on vendors are removed, innovation is accelerated, and choice is yours.
What products and services do you provide specifically to campus card operations?
FutureState's platform currently includes three core products:
CardSync is our flagship credential lifecycle management platform that manages all integrations between credential issuance and credential-consuming systems, independently of any single vendor. Our extensive library of integrations includes ERP/SIS, meal plan, physical and mobile credentials, physical access control, copy/print, campus rec, parking, and many other systems. CardSync handles all the rules governing eligibility, lifecycle and synchronization, including the added complexity that comes with mobile. It operates behind the scenes so that campus card offices never have to manually reconcile systems again.
CardPulse is the administrative front end of CardSync, designed specifically for campus card professionals. CardPulse provides real-time visibility into the status of every credential across every integrated system, empowering card office staff to instantly identify sync issues, drill down into individual records, and resolve problems without passing students around campus. Built-in usage reporting and analytics meet the requirements of wallet providers for campuses utilizing mobile credentials. CardPulse turns what used to be diagnostic challenges into a clean, intuitive operational tool.
BalanceU is a meal plan and declining balance solution that breaks free from the all-in-one model, giving universities a dedicated, best-in-class commerce platform without the baggage of a system trying to do everything at once. Through our partnership with Trove Gateway, BalanceU connects to an extensive library of transaction, vending, and point-of-sale integrations. This allows campuses to bring their own hardware and choose from a wide range of point-of-sale solutions, rather than being forced into proprietary equipment. The result is a future-proof commerce platform that grows with the institution, not with the vendor.
Each product is designed to stand alone or work in concert, dropping into existing environments without disruption, or combining to give campus card operations complete end-to-end control over both credential infrastructure and commerce, independent of any single vendor.
Is there a new product or service you want to tell us about?
We are introducing BalanceU to the NACCU community at a pivotal moment for campus commerce. The meal plan and declining balance market has seen significant disruption recently, leaving many institutions searching for alternatives and questioning what comes next. BalanceU was built for exactly this moment, offering real choice and a future-facing solution unconstrained by decades of technical debt. Built on modern cloud architecture and codebase, BalanceU delivers new features and enhancements faster than legacy platforms can.
What makes BalanceU different isn't just its architecture. We built it from inside higher ed with meal plan administrators, students, and parents in mind. With BalanceU we incorporated all the features we always wished existed while delivering a genuinely intuitive experience.
Like all of our solutions, BalanceU is open and connects with an extensive array of best-in-class systems. Through our partnership with Trove, institutions have the freedom to choose innovative transaction, vending, and point-of-sale systems with no proprietary lock-in.
What are you hoping to gain from your NACCU membership?
We're coming to NACCU as people who have spent decades on the university side of this community, and we couldn't be more excited to finally be here as a corporate member.
We know this community. We've presented at this conference. We've felt the frustrations of being beholden to vendor lock-in. We've lived the challenge of wanting to go mobile but not having an affordable, flexible path to get there. FutureState exists because of those experiences, and NACCU is exactly the community we want to serve.
Through our NACCU membership, we hope to:
• Connect with and learn from campus card professionals across every institution type, so we can continue building products that solve real operational problems, not just technology problems.
• Share what we've built and what we've learned at the University of Arizona, so other campuses can benefit from our experience and accelerate their own path to breaking free from vendor lock-in and adopting innovations like mobile.
• Build partnerships with the broader campus card ecosystem, including credential providers, hardware vendors, and dining operators, to deepen our integration network and create more value for the universities we serve.
• Contribute to the advancement of the industry, particularly around the paradigm of expensive and cumbersome all-in-one legacy solutions. We genuinely believe FutureState can help flip the script and put universities in the drivers' seat by forcing competition rather than lock-in as a business retention strategy. NACCU is the best place to make that happen.
Learn more about FutureState here.