JPMorgan Chase buys financial aid platform Frank

Frank CEO Charlie Javice joins the Yahoo Finance Live panel to discuss the latest outlook for financial aid.

Video transcript

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- Welcome back to Yahoo Finance. JPMorgan is betting big on financial planning. They're buying college financial aid platform, Frank. We want to bring in Charlie Jarvice. She's the CEO of Frank, who will continue to lead the firm following this acquisition and also our education reporter, Arthi Swaminathan, is joining us as well.

Charlie, it's great to see you. Congratulations, obviously a huge deal for your company. I guess, what attracted you to JPMorgan? Why were they the right suitor for Frank?

CHARLIE JAVICE: So it's funny because when I told my mom the news, she said, of course JPMorgan bought Frank. You said they would be your number one when you started the company. And what really attracted me, honestly, was the people. I started this company, and one of my favorite parts of the job is working with amazing people from all different backgrounds. And what was truly amazing was the leadership to daily managers.

Everyone just had such different perspectives. I probably met one or two men in the process. The bank is run by two really fantastic women, and a lot of the leadership is just so inspiring. So that really was what drove me to make that decision and from a secondary perspective, I believe Chase is, at least, the largest bank in the US, serving over 60 million customers in the states, which is just huge. And so I could not think of a better platform to accelerate or impact, multiply it, and really get to the next level in terms of helping students get better access to college in the US.

AARTHI SWAMINATHAN: Charlie, there are major changes coming to the financial aid form FAFSA that students fill out to basically get aid. How do these forms affect Frank? I'm just curious about that and also, especially, we're not going to see these roll out immediately. They're going to take some time. So I'm just curious, how is the company going to adapt to all these changes that were legislated.

CHARLIE JAVICE: Yeah, so when we read through the changes what is really incredible, actually, is from a paper FAFSA form, obviously, the changes are incredible because you just pick a checkbox. That being said, for the last few years at least, people have been using what's called the data retrieval tool to be able to actually simplify this process. So in any event from a digital experience perspective what is simply changing is instead of putting your username and password into the data retrieval tool, you are checking a checkbox into it.

Which ultimately doesn't necessarily alter the customer experience in terms of awareness, in terms of financial education content, in terms of actually being able to get on demand support through chat and live people, as well as just the experience on the back end that continues on with state aid and scholarships, soon to be help finding jobs near campus that could meet your major, as well as the different courses that we offer at a discount through our platform. So we've really taken the entire paying for college and come up with a value proposition that makes students come to us for a bunch of different reasons now, other than simply FAFSA. So with all that together, we very much are excited to tackle these changes and are very, very happy that the government is taking thoughtful steps to start addressing the digital problem when it comes to the form overall.

AARTHI SWAMINATHAN: Charlie, we got some reports in July that the number of FAFSA forms that were filed this year had gone down, and that's compared to the year before. Do you have a sense of whether that's true and also, looking forward to October 1st when the deadline sort of opens up again, do you think there will be more or less? What are your sort of forecasts when you look at this?

CHARLIE JAVICE: Yeah, so the reports from the government data are definitely correct in terms of just applications, what they say, falling off a cliff, which it is. It's a few 100,000 students that were unable or did not want to complete their FAFSA compared to the prior year, primarily impacting the [? low to ?] income segment of households in a really big way and those who are most underserved in general in terms of resource. The other thing that we saw, which was interesting, is that in the adult learner segment, there were a lot less women who started going back to school compared to men. Which based on working from home and potentially childcare for single mothers, makes a lot of sense. So that was very hard hit and COVID had a huge impact when it came to financial aid and helping the lowest income be able to afford and go to college at the end of the day.

For this season, I do expect there to be a lot of momentum because it has been some version of additionally highlighted and providing more resources to financial aid. Also, obviously, with Chase and our backing, we have big plans when it comes to this financial aid season to help as many families in the US pay for school the right way and be able to get as much of the pell grants out there without leaving money on the table. So we're very excited for that to be able to accelerate our impact and growth.

- Charlie Javice, the CEO of Frank and, of course, our thanks to RT Swaminathan.