Several thousand units of laptops worth 500€ each were made available to low-income students at 149€ each and a service contract of 14.9€ per month for 2 year´s time. No credit check was required, just signing up for the contract and paying the initial amount through a debit in the bank account stated in the contract.

Statistical data showed, after running the program for more than 2 years, that 27.9% of users stopped paying the monthly installments at some point. CUCo Firmware Security on the laptops detected the noncompliance and automatically locked the device. Following the costumized “lost-and-found/locked” message 98.6% of users contacted the call-center, payed the overdue installments and got a one-time code to unlock the device and reactivate it. CUCo provided a massive reduction of default payments by locking uncompliant units.

It was also confirmed that 3% of the units have been offline for more than 2 months, and CUCo´s internal rules locked them even without network connectivity. During the period, 2% of the units have been reported by users as stolen or lost, but given their “digital footprint” when contacting the CUCo server, most were recovered and handed back to the user or reported to the authorities. At the end of the contract period all compliant units were freed from the CUCo control.

In this scenario, the majority of the installments in default would have been lost or the cost of recovering them through the traditional recovery agents or legal system would be too high and thus CUCo Firmware Security proved to save more than 20% of the sales price per unit. If not for the CUCo solution, large deployment projects based on future financial streams would not be viable. CUCo is a truly enabler for DaaS model in Education.