
April 13, 2020
A path to student loan freedom
Oscar Hong
Nearly 48 million Americans have outstanding student loans. When you add them all up, they total more than $1.5 trillion.
On an individual level, those debts are changing the way people live. Increasingly, they must delay life milestones like getting married, having kids, buying a home, and saving for retirement.
In 2017, Aaron Smith and Tobin Van Ostern founded Savi to help borrowers find relief. Savi is a digital platform that identifies better loan-repayment and loan-forgiveness options so that their users can get out of debt faster.
“For many of us, student loan debt is a barrier to living the lives we want,” said Van Ostern. “Aaron and I are doing everything we can to fix that.”
To make their platform work, Savi faced a unique challenge. They needed a way to quickly and easily connect to all of someone’s student loans. For that, they turned to Plaid, who gives Savi the full picture of a user’s debt situation.