CAN EARNEST CONVINCE GRADUATING MILLENNIALS TO TALK ABOUT (GULP) THEIR FINANCES?
Nothing says “congratulations on your graduation” like an email from your student loan servicer reminding you that your first payments will soon be due.
That five- or six-figure bill is the financial hangover that thousands of newly minted graduates are waking up to this month as they reenter the workforce, diplomas in hand. “Game of Loans: interest is coming,” one Wayne State University senior wrote in protest on her graduation cap. “I got 99 problems and student loans are all of them,” another tweeted.
But if graduates are quick to vent their anger and anxiety (#StudentDebtStress has been trending on Twitter), they are not necessarily eager to engage in a deeper conversation with a financial advisor or their peers. Enter Earnest cofounder and CEOLouis Beryl: He wants millennials to harness their frustration, and take action.
“Really high-quality, high-potential young people are just being dramatically overcharged and mispriced by the credit system,” Beryl says. “You’ve heard all of these things—you need to go get a J.Crew card, and pay it off—that’s crazy! All the workarounds—the system isn’t built right.”
Earnest is an attempt to correct those flaws, and in the process save young borrowers thousands of dollars. Beryl and his growing team launched the company last year with a personal loan product designed to cover major life events like relocation or marriage, and introduced a student loan refinancing product in January. Unlike traditional loan providers, which evaluate borrowers’ credit histories through the lens of the FICO system, and unlike startups such as LendUp, which mine Facebook and social mediato assess borrowers’ risk of default, Earnest approves applicants based on a comprehensive snapshot of their career history and their finances.
“It’s all about the causal factors that affect your ability to repay—so your income, your cash flows,” Beryl says. “We have you connect your bank account, your active credit cards, your home loan, your student loans. We also give people the opportunity to connect their asset accounts.” The end result: “It dramatically reduces fraud. It dramatically reduces our costs. And it allows us to pass on those savings to customers.”
That message is resonating: Earnest is on track to hit a lending run rate of $1 billion by the end of the year. According to the company, the average customer paying off a bachelor’s degree will save $11,143 with Earnest; savings are even higher for graduate-level degree-holders like MBAs ($14,740) and lawyers ($30,715).
One of the customers who participated in the company’s student loan refinancing pilot, Beryl says, was a librarian with a master’s degree in English literature. “This person makes a librarian’s salary but pays all bills on time and saves a huge amount of money each month.” In Earnest’s world, that borrower can refinance and save thousands of dollars, based on those good habits.
[“source-fastcompany.com”]