Loanership™

We are committed to finding innovative solutions in the higher education space to fill funding gaps that financial burden contributes to the student drop-out problem.  We are proposing to scale the PYT flagship product the Loanership™ which provides innovation in the scholarship industry by its innate ability to be a credit building scholarship.  We combine alternative data and social vouching to evaluate a person’s credibility. We will look at transcripts and social activities to assess students' potential. In short, our solution positively helps students increase their chances of earning a degree. Our solution can positively impact the economy by funding more graduates and lowering the default ratio. Lowering the default percentage will ultimately recover costs to the taxpayer. Our innovative financing approach creates a new path to fund new skills and re-skill our working economy. Our solution can change the world by raising educational equity to a higher level.

Many students all over the U.S. are struggling to stay in school let alone graduate on time due to financial constraints. According to the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center in 2019, less than 60 percent of students who started at a four-year school completed their degree within six years. PYT targets students who are already admitted into college that have typically exhausted all of their federal loans and are in need of one more boost to graduate. For decades now college students have coped with the rising cost of tuition by borrowing which is now the primary way many young people pay for college. An unequal burden on communities of color has historically been denied access to fair and equitable credit. At all schools, almost 40 percent of black borrowers drop out, compared to 29 percent of whites, the main reason is that students of color do not have enough access to credit to complete the degrees they started.

The Loanership™ is a hybrid between a loan and a scholarship that is formatted in a way to build credit simultaneously. It decreases the number of loans which the students are responsible for paying and helps students build their credit early on their college life cycle. Our process uses crowdfunded money and a reinforced machine learning algorithm to develop a financial scoring mechanism (PYT Score) tailored for students in underserved communities. This gives them the ability to get the last bit of funding needed to ultimately graduate. The PYT Score uses alternative data models which enables students without credit history or access to a qualified cosigner the ability to secure additional funding for their school. The Loanership™ process also includes a distributed shared ledger to ensure that representatives from underserved communities are able to track and verify that their community needs are being met.

Our primary target population is low-income to mid-income undergraduate college students who are more than halfway through their degrees but have exhausted all other sources of funding options to pay for their college education. Low-income students frequently take out large loans at the beginning of their higher education career to pay for their college education. However, with a lower likelihood of having a credit score or cosigner, these students are more likely to then exhaust these loan options that they need in order to complete their degrees. Juniors and Seniors from low-income families find themselves in huge amounts of debt, yet still unable to finish the rest of their degrees. Currently, of the 36 million Americans with some college but no degree, roughly half are people of color (18 million people). African American and Hispanic populations make up more than a third of this statistic. We are estimating a target size of six million students per year.

The private student loan space is not currently structured to help the underserved, under-banked community get access to capital and students are feeling strapped by the weight of student loan debt as reform in federal policies and decision-making have a direct impact on college tuition. Current federal government financial aid is not enough to cover higher education costs, which creates a funding gap that the private student loan market fills. The private student loan market does not service clients with a 700 credit score and below.

PYT is the only platform that pulls together the following predictive lending process: We combine crowdfunding as a customer acquisition tool and loan risk mitigator to source the best students with alternative social and predictive data combined with the traditional lending process. Our next milestone is to become a certified CDFI (community development fund) to truly serve this emerging underserved market and to create a disruption to a big problem. There are numerous ways we can innovate to find solutions to student loan debt once we are a community development fund. The combination of the certification and our scoring process is the clear differentiator to competitors.


Lastly, we are the only financial solution that uplifts the student with a workforce development tool that helps the students to highlight the key professional traits needed to market and negotiate their first starting salary after graduation.

We are providing the financing structure that will allow workers in the United States to improve or acquire new skills from universities, community colleges, and alternative educations, for example, boot camp. They can go to more technical schools and we will provide the financing structure to help people go back to school to re-skill and re-try. Our solution is well-aligned with the challenge of the competition because we feel the financing structure to provide opportunities for all Americans to get access to education to be re-trained and re-skilled.

Our goal is to advance projects with a dedicated team that is beyond the idea formation stage, but which have not yet generated over $1M USD in funding and/or revenue at the time of submission, and that have completed a proof of concept for the core functionality of the product/service at a minimum.

We launched our program in 2014 and we are still growing. The year 2020 has proved that our model works and our solution is starting to gain traction. We served 1702 people in 2017, 3856 people in 2018, and currently serving 7458 people. The number of people getting served increased as well as the number of donations. The number of donations steadily increased starting with 486 in 2017, 1820 in 2018, 2025 in 2019, and 6998 in 2020.

1. We have a licensed trademark for the Loanership. The USPTO which is the United States Patent and Trademark Office has recognized our flagship product is unique to the financial services market. We are the first company that serves this type of service. Therefore, the creation of a credit-builder scholarship is what makes us different.

2. Our platform is unique and different because we have created a solution that combines crowdfunded dollars with alternative data to serve overlooked communities.

3. The private student loan market is far from adequately democratized and acts as a barrier for women and people of color who often lack collateral, sufficient credit, or a qualified co-signer. The segments of the market that we serve typically are not seen as valuable to our competitors because of high risk lending and have a low paid-back percentage. This problem is an additional hurdle to minority students who need to find ways to fill their tuition gaps or be kicked out of the college each semester. We offer an alternative for those students who either never qualified for funding or have exhausted traditional student loan options.

At PYT, we listen to the voice of students. Here is a link to all of our past and current interns https://www.gopyt.com/fubu. The company is built to serve students and our internship numbers show that. PYT believes students are always the heart of the company. Our model is built by students for students. (241 words)

Currently serve: 10,000. By end of next year, we hope to serve 20,000. And in five years, around 100,000.

We have a nation builder to track the number of users served. Our accounting keeps track of the amount spent on scholarships and grants and loans. 

Full-time staff: 5

Part-time staff: 3

Interns: 10

Our team is well-positioned to deliver this solution because we have team players who have expertise in educational advising and technology. Our team leader is Richard Adams, whose previous experience includes managing operations for a Fortune 500 Company and forging relationships with diverse stakeholders. Richard spent 5 years in the Commercial Real Estate services industry learning and cultivating knowledge on REIT investments, capitalization rates, and helping the start-up LoopNet to complete an IPO. As a Co-founder of PYT Funds, Richard partnered with long term friend and mentor Stacie Whisonant to innovate the finance industry and offer a solution to the country’s overbearing student loans and debt crisis. Stacie Whisonant spent 13 years in the financial services industry, utilizing her SEC license to manage mortgages, structured settlements, and annuities for the world’s largest international banking and financial services organization - HSBC. We have Wardell Samotshozo, a Methodical CTO with 4+ years of experience in the fintech industry who worked at financial services agencies such as Freddie Mac. He also has 8 years of experience strategizing and implementing low-cost and fault-tolerant solutions at agencies. He is a strong team player to help PYT build and improve technology infrastructure. 

Pay Your Tuition has a joined force with the banking experience experts and the tech talents to deliver an innovative financing model. We believe that our team is well-positioned to deliver this solution because we have relevant skills and have a strong passion in our primary mission: reduce the burden of student loan debt.

PYT defines Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion at its root as we are a service connected to a disabled US Army Veteran, female-founded, minority, and LGBT+ organizations. We are proud to say that over 90% of our organization represents a diverse community, and our team is built up from different socio-economic backgrounds. Not only is the company built upon minorities, but our products also serve minorities in need. Our solution is designed to address the socio-economic issues surrounding underserved communities and democratize the private student loan market by removing the barriers separating women and people of color who often lack collateral, sufficient credit, or a qualified co-signer, from sufficient capital to complete their degree. In the process, by serving these economically-distressed populations, economic outcomes are improved by enhancing the career outcomes of individuals belonging to such populations, hence reducing economic inequalities existing in today's world.

We want to make college affordable for all students who request it.  Obtaining the knowledge and learning the skills needed will help students to secure jobs and create a healthy economic lifestyle. Since Covid-19, it is forecasted that going to a 4-year university will decrease. Our education financial product will create a way to finance the future. This includes re-training and re-skilling American workforce, and PYT is a way to pay for the future. Education is the key to the future. PYT’s financial products support their family goals and reimages the future workforce.

We need consistent, patient capital to build out our technological infrastructure and scale our solution. We also need to pipeline our next batch of talent and ultimately achieve our goal of serving 300,000 families nationwide. 

We have lost lots of talent as of late. Areas with which we require talent: social media, marketing, tech/design.

Public relations: improve social media marketing and branding hopefully through talent acquired. 

Technology needs to be scaled and updated, through funding and through programs and resources built for organizations. We hope new talent acquired can assist. 

We are seeking more opportunities to network with venture capitalists, schools, financial institutions, family offices, and technology companies. Therefore, in addition to the monetary award, the additional connections to the MIT sponsors would be helpful. We are seeking to connect with following companies for the following reasons. 

PYT would like to partner with IBM which is the leader of the blockchain. From a technology perspective, working with IBM will refine and polish our technology stack. The IBM connection can help to run a more refined platform using IBM Watson. 

We would like to work closer with more universities. We are requesting to connect with the MIT Financial Aid office to discuss how to help the school increase graduation and retention rate. We regconize that MIT has a strong retention and graduation rate.

MFS (Morgridge Family Foundation) is one key organization that we would like to connect and partner with. Family offices like MFS usually have donor advised funds, so we would like to start getting a warm introduction to  more family offices. Philanthropic organizations value our Loanership product because the Loanership is the first ever credit building scholarship. This allows donor dollars to have greater impact. Also, donor-advised funds can be directed to the PYT company or PYT Foundation. Last but not least, PYT would like to partner with the Gary Community Investment Fund to raise additional venture capital, which is one of our priorities for 2021

International students who immigrate from developing countries to the US for education opportunities have no access to federal and state government funding. Currently, there are 34 states that offer little or no assistance to international students. 

For example, Lakeisha immigrated to DC from Guyana to gain access to education opportunities and her career. Lakeisha was interested in law, however Guyana offered limited education opportunities & no law school. Lakeisha & many other international students recognize that there are a plethora of opportunities and a greater education system in the US. Through the O-1 Visa process & PYTF, Lakeisha has gained experience in running her own business & was also accepted into a prestigious accelerator: Halcyon incubator. Lakeisha has been given the opportunity to compile her own original work & create jobs. (O-1 Visa required) to realize her full potential. Education is the foundation of a just & equitable society, & helping international students take advantage of emerging financial & educational opportunities promote global social justice & democracy.

The story of Lakeisha provides an excellent illustration of the outcomes possible with this sort of assistance. Thanks to the O-1 Visa & with the help of PYTF, Lakeisha was able to gain significant business experience. As a result, she was able to fully realize her potential and she will have significant experience and education to benefit her country & the United States of America. Funding will be used to attract more international students and provide them the opportunity to be a Lakeisha. 

Our solution utilizes AI and blockchain. And with it, we developed a very unique scoring model which incorporates machine learning to evaluate students. We work high-touch with the student and the family to ensure all transparency and proper needs are identified.  We developed a neural network-based scoring model (PYT Score) which predicts fraud and default rate that will allow us to work with the students to assess the level of employability/credibility of our students at the time of the application, to the technology to monitor their progress.  The PYT Score uses academic, career and social data to shine the light on  “credit invisible” students by providing transparency and applying a value to students with unknown credit risk. Also, we partner with mentoring organizations for customer acquisition and referral of the applicants. Additional funding to invest in cyber security is a key priority of PYT to ensure the security of our customers. 

We provide direct development services by engaging with the client from the beginning application stage to the ending servicing stage. Our goal is to spend the technical funds by building the remaining infrastructure on our nodes with hyperledger fabric. This will ensure accuracy, efficiency, effectiveness, checks and balance of data management, top security, and transparency to the stakeholders. This technology will provide a more secure platform that also allows transparency. We are currently investigating incorporating a proof of authority consensus mechanism on our Loanership™ process.