New York based online lender CommonBond has announced a new direct student loan service to be introduced alongside their previous debt refinancing services. Variable rates start at 2.87% annual percentage rate of charge and fixed rates that start at 5.50%
The company is known for its strict qualification requirements for refinancing packages and with an initial focus on the high end of student lending (servicing only 20 — mostly ivy league — colleges and universities at the time of its launch), CommonBond has become a nascent force in the student loan refinancing business. Now chief executive officer David Klein is turning the company’s attention to direct lending. It’s the last piece of the student lending puzzle that the company had yet to solve. Other companies in the lending market, like Pave and Upstart, had approached college financing with a model that exchanged tuition money for a percentage of a student’s future earnings, but both have both pivoted away from equity financing to become straight personal lenders.