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Tuition.io, Santa Monica’s small but mighty fin tech company, announced Fenway Summer’s Raj Date as its newest investor last week, a boost to help the team keep up with a growth rate that even Techcrunch admits is “scorching.” The student loan management tool currently manages over $1 billion in student loans and that number is still “growing at an incredible rate,” CTO Wilton Risenhoover said.
In just over a year, Tuition.io grew from managing about $250 million in student loans to passing the much-coveted $1 billion mark. This rate will likely continue “for the foreseeable future,” Risenhoover said.
But the stats aren’t surprising if you consider just how big of a problem Tuition.io solves: about 37 million people in US have student loans, which totals to about $1 trillion. Alumni often owe multiple lenders, making payments nearly impossible to keep track of.
Tuition.io’s momentous market opportunity originally caught the company a lot of press when it launched back in 2011 under the not-as-catchy name of Binksty. Today, the dozen-person team led by co-founder and CEO Brendon McQueen doesn’t often draw attention to itself though. Instead, Risenhoover said they are heads-down, focusing on market share, monetization and simply “trying to keep a small staff while we build out this core.”
A big component to this “core” is direct partnerships with universities to provide college seniors with a basic financial literacy course and to sign them up for Tuition.io. Risenhoover called these partnerships a “natural” fit for everyone: Tuition.io captures more users, students get ahold of their personal finances (and get a peek into their post-college debt) while universities receive very powerful data about its graduates and their loans.
Universities need this data to track the percentage of graduates that default on student loans, a percentage which affects school’s abilities to provide Title IV loans (aka federal aid). Right now, the Department of Education supplies them with this information, but Risenhoover said it’s often dated or just plain wrong. Tuition.io gives and gets this data in real-time.
Universities aren’t the only ones that would be interested in Tuition.io’s data though: “macro cohort data is going to be valuable from an economist’s perspective, too,” Risenhoover said.
The first step in these university partnerships is finding the right content providers to frame personal finance in concrete terms for college students. Tuition.io has a wealth of fin tech companies to choose from and is working “to play nice with everybody,” Risenhoover said, as they launch this initiative this fall with about a dozen universities.
