EXCLUSIVE—With over 44 million U.S. borrowers looking to repay more than $1.4 trillion in student loan debt, having financial services that could help with the process is a serious concern for both bank customers and banks.
Financial technology and chatbot provider Personetics wants to help. Set to demonstrate it solution today during the Money20/20 conference taking place in Las Vegas, the company has designed a service that could allow banks to provide some much-needed student loan relief to their customers.
“Essentially, this is another way of using the same capability we have for auto saving,” Eran Livneh, VP of Marketing for Personetics, told Bank Innovation of the service. One of the company’s other applications makes use of AI for automatic savings, integrated into bank applications. “What we do is, we start from where a customer can realistically save, looking at their income, their data. This ‘nudging’ approach can work well for achieving other financial goals.”
‘Nudging’ relies on the assumption that people are pre-disposed towards the easiest option of any decision. Using this theory, combined with artificial intelligence, the Personetics application will allow for student loan repayment in small, easier to grasp steps.
The solution, which can be white-labeled and integrated into existing banking services, using predictive analytics powered by AI to provide these “nudges” to customers.
In the case of student loan debt, these nudges — which could take the form of push notifications or other alerts, depending on the user’s bank — could reveal hidden money that could be put towards the loan, or alert a user that they have the present ability to make an additional payment on the loan, Livneh said.
Naturally, additional payments or bigger payments will provide noted financial benefits to users (like allowing them to pay back the loan faster or saving money when it comes to interest payments). The service also provides more freedom to the user, Livneh said, as payment is entirely up to the individual user.
“We’re probably never going to completely automate [the service] for them,” Livneh said. “The payment amount is not fixed, it can change when your income and your spending patterns fluctuate.”
That flexibility could be key for some of the 44 million borrowers in the U.S., as most are younger graduates building families, careers, and financial portfolios (with the ensuing costs).
No financial institutions have integrated this capability yet, though Personetics has “a number of banks looking into it,” Livneh said.
It is also worth noting that as a white-labeled service, there is really nothing stopping a fintech from integrating it—which can be done, according to Livneh, though it’s not a focus for the company at the moment—into their own systems.
While some nonbank student lenders have had their share of trouble lately, there are still more than a few looking to compete with banks in the sector. Perhaps AI could provide them a little nudge forward.