Improving servicing and growth at Prodigy Finance.

Students considering an international degree needed advice from people who had already done it. I built the community programme around existing borrowers, connecting prospective students with people who could speak from experience.

My 2023 investment case took that further. Applying Elena Verna's growth-loop thinking, I proposed making community a repeatable source of growth: give borrowers useful reasons to engage, then help that participation bring in the next generation of students.

Around 85% of servicing customers already had the app, and repayment gave us a four-to-six-year relationship. They had ongoing needs, from finding jobs to settling abroad. Starting with those borrowers gave us an existing audience whose experience could help others.

I proposed career support as the engagement loop: a borrower comes for job opportunities, connects with peers, receives useful help, then contributes advice or referrals and builds their reputation. That participation could feed an acquisition loop through recommendations and conversations with prospective students.

Half of customers who took a loan in 2022 said they had heard about Prodigy from a friend. Those reporting a friend's referral converted 34% higher than average.

The programme's early results supported the next investment case. The wider loop was the proposed direction. These figures measure participation in the programme; the full loop's incremental lift was never measured.

The servicing remit covered three connected domains: the borrower-facing experience, the platform that collected and managed repayments, and the community connecting borrowers and alumni. I led product across a cross-functional team of three PMs, two designers, two analysts and more than 22 engineering staff, setting priorities across customer-facing and operational work at once.

I ran the business unit's monthly performance reviews myself, presenting alongside Finance to company leadership, with legal, compliance and risk as standing attendees. With servicing responsible for 63% of the platform's customer lifetime value, those conversations needed to tie product decisions to borrower outcomes and the economics of the loan book.

Default rates were the obvious metric, but they didn't explain every source of customer loss. I identified a competitor refinancing away some of Prodigy's strongest borrowers at lower rates, a drag on the loan book over a seven-month period. By mid-2023, that pattern had moved earlier in the loan lifecycle too, affecting customers just entering repayment as well as those further along. Identifying the pattern informed our retention work.

First-time repayment rates had fallen from historical levels above 90% to 84%. I ran a full diagnosis of where customers were dropping out of the repayment process, and two causes dominated: customers we simply couldn't reach (47%), and customers who couldn't yet afford the repayment (31%). That distinction changed the response, since a communication problem and an affordability problem need different interventions.

We tested changes against it. A payment-reminder experiment lifted on-time payment from 66% to 72% in the tested group, and a payment-status feature cut related support contacts by 20%. Across the mobile repayments and self-service work more broadly, in-app payment share grew from 62% to 68%.

I secured $800K for the servicing roadmap, including automation to cut repetitive manual work. Settlement-offer handling dropped from 22 minutes to around nine, document handling time fell by roughly 95%, and monthly close shortened from three days to two.

In September 2023 I moved into Growth, leading loan originations. Visits were up, but visits-to-application-start conversion had slipped to 6.3%: a bigger top of funnel wouldn't help if the funnel itself was leaking, so I fixed that before pushing for more volume.

The fix meant redesigning the application ahead of peak season, improving school-catalogue search and the prospective-borrower community experience, launching return-on-education and interest-rate calculators, and keeping website health above 90% to protect organic traffic. Together, these lifted visits-to-application-start conversion from 6.3% to 10% with no decline in applicant quality, and application completion rose 27%.

Only once that leak was fixed did I push on reach: the school expansion project that went on to drive 22% of Prodigy Finance's loans in 2024. The partner-school network grew from around 900 to more than 2,100, extending coverage beyond the US, and improvements to onboarding cut the time required by 70%.