Overture Technologies Develops Online Service to Provide Students with More Secure, Reliable Way to Shop for Private Student Loans


Bethesda, Maryland (PRWEB) April 16, 2009

Overture Technologies, the leading provider of decisioning software solutions that enable transparent, accurate and responsive lending processes for the mortgage and education finance industries, has announced the development of an online service that will be able to provide a more secure, reliable way for students to shop for private student loans. The Student Loan Marketplace is an innovative education financing tool that can help students and their families learn about and compare loan terms in an open and transparent network of lenders.

Overture plans to launch the service through marketing partners, such as associations of colleges and universities, and with participating lenders. The Student Loan Marketplace is the first multi-lender platform that allows students to review reliable private student loan terms based on their own personal and financial information instead of “as low as” advertisements for rates.

Amid the current rising costs of college and challenging economic environment, U.S. Department of Education data indicates applications for federal student aid in 2009 have increased by more than 20 percent over the same period last year. After exhausting all available scholarships, grants, work-study and low-cost federal loans, many students often must consider private student loans to finance part of the cost of education. This search has proven to be a challenge for many students, particularly those with little or no credit record, as the strain on credit markets has also resulted in a contraction of lending sources.

According to a College Board report on student borrowing trends, private student loan volume accounts for almost 25 percent of total education loan volume. The Student Loan Marketplace has been created to give students a secure, transparent resource where they can be matched with lenders to choose a loan based on the criteria that is most important to their individual situations.

*More Secure, Reliable Comparison Shopping for Students Who Are New to Borrowing

Currently, students new to borrowing are faced with a very confusing and time-consuming process to make apples-to-apples comparisons of private student loan terms from multiple lenders. If a student wishes to compare accurate rates and terms, he or she must enter personal information at each lender’s web site and consent to a credit pull before obtaining information suitable for comparison shopping, and then determine how to interpret calculations of APR and other costs across various loan products. With just one credit pull, The Student Loan Marketplace presents a side-by-side comparison of reliable loan products and terms on one page, and provides helpful explanations of terms.

“We built the Marketplace to put students in control of their private loans, giving them unprecedented insight into the details of the loan options available to them,” said David Kirby, general manager of Overture Technologies’ Education Finance Solutions group. “The Marketplace platform enables reliable comparisons of multiple private student loans in minutes – until now, no resource like this has been available.”