Struggling to Pay for School? This D.C. Startup Wants to Help

To pay for college, Stacie Whisonant joined the Army Reserve. It made sense for her: Her parents divorced when she was in high school, they didn't have much saved for her college tuition and she was intimidated by student loans.

To pay for college, Whisonant's sister, like many of us, turned to student loans. Their parents co-signed on different loans, and it's taking a bit of time to repay it all.

Watching her sister pay back her student loans was just one of the sparks for Whisonant's startup: Pay Your Tuition Funds (or PYT Funds).

Founded in 2013, PYT works with students entering and in college to find the best way for them to, well, pay their tuition. PYT can create what they call a "Student FICO score" based on an applicant's academic success, internship and volunteer experience, and work experience to assess if they would be a good investment for local banks. They can also help students set up crowdfunding profiles to help them close the gap between their financial aid package and tuition bill.

"I started to build a platform where students could raise money to pay their student loan debt," Whisonant said.

"When I built the platform, a lot of the students who were coming to me didn't have debt yet because they were trying to graduate. They were trying to get access to debt."

Before starting PYT, Whisonant spent a good chunk of her career in banking. She spent seven years at HSBC in Rockville, Md., and then another four years at Stone Street Capital working mostly with recent lottery winners to help them manage their winnings.

The next move was always going to be an entrepreneurial one, Whisonant said. But it was a matter of what idea she would pursue.

"I was working in a field where someone would have no money and then the next day they would have millions of dollars, and you try to teach them to save and do the right thing with that money," she said. "That's when I was like I need to get into financial services and start building products that would help people in a way that I felt comfortable."

That's where PYT came in. Since launch, PYT has grown to about six full-time staff members, two part-time employees and three interns. They've taken in funds from a few angel investors and awards. They were members of the Halcyon Incubator in Georgetown, and PYT participated in a fintech lab in New York City.

Everything else has been bootstrapped, coming from Whisonant herself. PYT makes the service free for students to use, and they charge a service fee for all banks that want to use the platform to find more student customers.

Whisonant said that unlike their competition, PYT isn't a scholarship platform and they're not a micro-loan service."We have found a way to make it a for-profit business and a social impact business," she said. "There's no other platform that brings together crowdfunding and bank funding."

Moving forward, Whisonant said the dream is to return to her original idea: helping students get out of debt. Right now, PYT focuses a lot on getting students to the finish line, but in the future, they also want to create services to help students get to the finish line of their student loan debt.

"It's a journey, and I feel like we are only 50 percent of the way," Whisonant said. "Now, it's about scaling, it's about getting our name out there."