While building GradJoy, a student loan personal finance app, we realized the difficulties of integrating with brittle loan data providers. On average, a GradJoy user held student loans across 5 servicers, which meant that they would need to authenticate with 7 sets of credentials to get a holistic picture of their student loan debt.

Few users ever managed to connect all accounts because they either didn’t remember their passwords, felt uncomfortable sharing them, or the auth flow simply failed. Additionally, these brittle integrations meant that the users would need to re-authenticate every few weeks. This poor user experience led to frustrated users and further increased churn. 

Over the past few months, we pulled together a solution that makes retrieving a consumers’ debt seamless, enabling our customers to realize a tremendous improvement in user experience and allowing them to focus on building products that improve the financial outcomes of millions of Americans.

Introducing Method’s Data API

Method’s Data API allows you to instantly access your users' complete debt portfolio using just their phone number - that’s it! Method Data instantly retrieves every single debt item across all types of debts. Immediately access key loan details including:

• Balances and amount due
• Disbursement dates and due dates
• Interest rate
• Loan type and descriptive details

Our direct integrations allows you to continuously receive updates on the latest changes to debt items including any new items - no re-authentication needed, ever.‍

One auth for all debts

Our goal is to build products that work across all types of debts. Our first product, Method Payments, allows you to push money to any type of debt. Method Data builds upon our debt agnostic core allowing us to immediately fetch debt information regardless of type and lender.

Rather than creating brittle screen scrapping APIs for every type of debt and lender, we wanted to provide a reliable, stable and complete data experience while retaining the simplicity so you can delight your users. Here's how it works:

• Your user authenticates using their phone number with our Method Auth embeddable.
• Method retrieves all liability data (student loans, credit cards, etc.) and ensures consistency across all fields.
• All of a user's debts are immediately accessible and payable using the Method Payments API.
• Continuously receive updates on existing including any new debts.

What’s next?

We are launching Method Data today to our existing partners and are onboarding new design partners now. We are excited to see all the possible use cases and applications for Method Data. We'd love to hear how your comments, feedback and ideas on how you could use Method Data.

Schedule some time to connect here or email us directly at team@methodfi.com. We cannot wait to see what you will build. 🚀