Student Debt Solutions is growing and we are continually adding enhancements to make the borrower and agency experience even better. Since releasing our latest SDS v4 in May of 2022 we have made a number of improvements and we will be maintaining release notes like this one for updates as we go forward. Please note: If you have clients who have already gone through the SDS Analysis, you may want to have them to go through their SDS analysis session again to explore the advances in analysis and calculators. In order to go through again, they should log in to their dashboard as usual and select “make changes” at the top of the page where they can select how far back into their previous session they would like to go to either replay or modify their answers to the SDS questions
Updates/Enhancements in this release are as follows:
Borrower Portal
Enhanced account creation process including reminders for borrowers on where to find their confirmation email and the ability to resend the confirmation email if it is missed.
Income calculation tool to help the borrower determine their annual income or identify where to locate their AGI in their tax return transcript.
Enhanced Payment Plan Details that consider forgiveness options along with the payment plan details so the borrower gets a more accurate understanding of their projected monthly payment, total repayment amount, term, and amount of forgiveness (as applicable).
Agency Portal
Document Preparation can be used by the counselor in addition to the borrower. This enables the agency to offer a document preparation service and take advantage of the document preparation tools offered by SDS. The Doc Prep tools can be configured to be available to the borrower, the agency, or both.
Enhanced sorting/filtering of borrowers which allows the agency to better understand the progress that their clients are taking through the SDS program. The export to CSV also allows the agency to develop a mailing list to follow-up with borrowers.
Enhanced billing which shows the order details underlying all borrower transactions
Weekly Reports will be mailed to all users defined in the agency with the list of the borrowers that have created accounts during the previous week along with their progress through the SDS borrower portal.
Expert Mode
SDS introduces a new mode of operation that allows the counselor – or the expert – to “decide your plan” on behalf of the borrower.
This allows the agency to ensure that their counselor/expert is not only meeting with their client but making the best decision for them based on their counseling session
Expert mode is ideal for the agency that has a student loan counseling service that is dependent on a counselor being involved.
Expert mode is set on a marketing channel level meaning that an agency can have both a standard channel and an expert channel set up so the borrower can be directed to the channel that best suits their needs.
