Overview

Spinwheel payments for Student Loans, facilitated via the Bill Pay rails, may require additional verification on the account number from the user.

Below, we will break this down into "Required for Payment", "Not Required for Payment" and "May be Required for Payment". To accompany these statuses, we have included the rules that are necessary for payment on the bill pay rails for your evaluation.

Example account numbers for each servicer are included based on the expected value the user may return on their Credit Report. In cases of variance between the user's account number and what is returned from the bureau, we have provided the example accountNumber format that is expected to be updated on the user.

The intent of adding this is to provide further visibility and consistency to each step of the transaction process. These Bill Pay payment rails are supported by a Mastercard bill payment standard.

Usage

With the availability of the update account number API, you will be able to update any student loan(s) with the appropriate account number. You may determine if and when you will want to update the account number based on the capabilities matrix exposed per studentLoanId.

For payment, you will want to follow the communicated form of payment request, with the updated use of funds model

Per Payment Request

The CREATE /v1/payments/requests endpoint has the below requirements

Invocation Parameters:

Partner secret key
userId
extRequestId
use of funds object inclusive of the allocation array designation

Example code request:

{  
 "extRequestId": "j3gh59d-c87b-415e-94e2-15367975218d",  
 "amount": 500,  
 "payerId": "{{UUID}}",  
 "userId": "{{UUID}}",  
 "scheduleTs": 1636250123000,  
 "requestType": "ONE_TIME"  
 "useOfFunds": {  
   "allocation":[  
"liabilityType": "STUDENT_LOAN"  
"studentLoanId": "{{UUID}}",  
"percentage": 100,  
  ]  
 }  
}\`

The Update Account Number API

The PATCH /v1/users/:userId/studentLoans/:studentLoanId endpoint has the below requirements

extAccountId (the account number) is a required parameter

Example code request:

{
	accountNumber: string,
creditor: {
billingAddress: { 
	“addressLine1”: string,
	 “addressLine2”: string,
	“city”: string,
	“state”: string,
	“zip”: string,
	“zipExtension”: string,
}
}
}

Payment Coverage

The coverage for Student Loan via Bill Payments are as follows:

Student Loan Servicers	Account Number Update Status	Rules for Payment
Mohela	May be Required for Payment	9-11 digit account number is accepted
Aidvantage	May be Required for Payment	9-10 digit account number is accepted; a leading "F" may also be accepted followed by 9 digits
Nelnet	Required for Payment	9-10 digit account number is accepted; a leading "E" may also be accepted followed by 9 digits
Earnest	Not Required for Payment	6-22 digit account number is accepted
AES	May be Required for Payment	9-10 digit account number is accepted
Navient	Required for Payment	9-22 digit account number is accepted
EdFinancial	Required for Payment	9-10 digit account number is accepted; a leading "F" may be accepted followed by 9 digits
Heartland - ESCI	Required for Payment	DOE: 8 digit account number is accepted ECSI directly: 7 or 9 digit account number is accepted; leading letter(s) followed by 7 digits may be accepted
Mohela-SoFi	May be Required for Payment	Missouri Higher Ed:10 digit account number is accepted Mohela BillPay: 9-11 digit account number is accepted
Mohela-Laurel Road	May be Required for Payment	Missouri Higher Ed:10 digit account number is accepted Mohela BillPay: 9-11 digit account number is accepted
CFNC	Required for Payment	9 digit account number is accepted
Sallie Mae	May be Required for Payment	16 digit account number is accepted with '58525(0)' prefix
Discover	Not Required for Payment	11-15 digit account number is accepted

Capabilities Matrix

{
        "capabilities": {
            billPayment": {
                            "availability": "FIELD_ERROR",
                            "fieldErrors": [
                                {
                                    "field": "ACCOUNT_NUMBER",
                                    "error": "INVALID"
                                }
                            ]
          }
        }
}

Loan Level Payments/highImpact

Part of the current student loan payment request logic is the highImpact flag. With the highImpact flag, Spinwheel used to perform an evaluation to determine the most impactful loan to apply the payment towards. This highImpact logic is no longer available with the updated source of data.

For some of the loan servicers, Spinwheel supports payment to the specific loan - instead of at the loanAccount or group level. For these servicers, the change to these new payments rails will mean that by default all payments will be applied at the account level.