Plus, how one founder is building a student-loan-focused fintech amid a constantly changing policy environment |
If you are one of the 40 million Americans with student loan debt, you likely know that this week, the Department of Education suspended student loan forgiveness under the Income-Based Repayment plan, or IBR. The DOE says the suspension is temporary and a result of needing to update “systems” to account for recent court injunctions around the SAVE plan, a new income-driven repayment option created by the Biden administration in 2023. Yet, temporary or not, fintech founder and CEO Laurel Taylor says that the constant upheaval to federal student loan repayment policies in recent years has created unprecedented “chaos and confusion” for borrowers.
Taylor founded student loan repayment platform Candidly in 2016 after her own experience with student debt, and she and I recently sat down for a video interview to talk about how she’s growing her company in spite of the turbulent political environment—and also about what she’s hearing from borrowers.
“There's just a lot of fear. There's a lot of fear and distress around, ‘are these programs going to be available? Am I going to be able to continue to access them?’” Taylor told me. And Candidly’s job, she says, is to communicate to borrowers exactly what options are available to them. Candidly reaches consumers through their employers (Vanguard, Schwab, and Guild Education are just three companies that offer Candidly as an employee benefit), and Taylor says she feels, every day, the “urgency” around making loan repayment options as accessible as possible.
If you are a borrower looking for the latest news around federal student loans, I recommend checking out Forbes senior contributor Adam Minsky’s comprehensive coverage, including his latest piece on the student debt-related provisions from the GOP budget bill that are taking effect as we speak. And to see my full conversation with Laurel Taylor—which also includes an important bit on why it’s important for founders to pay themselves, and the big mistake Taylor herself made around this—click through here.
Cheers!
Maggie |
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| Private asset managers have been gathering money from high-net-worth individuals for more than a decade. Until now, though, they haven’t cracked regular investors’ $29 trillion retirement nest egg. In April, Vanguard and Wellington announced that they had formed a “strategic alliance” with Blackstone to offer products for individual investors blending private and public market assets. “If you look holistically at the economy, 20 years ago the average person who invested and bought mutual funds could invest in the whole economy. And that’s not true today,” Wellington Management CEO Jean Hynes told Forbes. “You have a whole part of the economy that is only for the institutional investor, and that’s all the private companies.... It’s fair that more individuals have access to that.” |
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ICYMI: Stories From The Week |
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On Wednesday, security and compliance software company Vanta announced a new $150 million fundraise that values the company at $4.15 billion, up from $2.45 billion when it last raised money a year ago. Vanta cofounder and CEO Christina Cacioppo said the company pulled in the funding despite not explicitly setting out to raise more—and hasn’t yet touched the $150 million it raised a year ago.
When photos of Jennifer Love Hewitt in a black spaghetti-strap dress appeared last week after she stepped onto the red carpet for the Los Angeles premiere of I Know What You Did Last Summer remake, a wave of ageist and body-shaming commentary quickly ensued online. As ForbesWomen contributor Virgie Tovar asks in this new piece, has Hewitt gone full circle from being hypersexualized at 18 to being slammed for aging at 46, or are body-shaming and hypersexualization—though seemingly opposite—just two sides of the same coin?
For 60 years, kids’ TV cast boys as ‘doers’ and girls as passive, a new study published in Psychological Science finds. Researchers examined scripts from 98 children’s television programs in the U.S. spanning from 1960 to 2018 to see how often male and female characters were portrayed as active agents (those who do) versus passive recipients (those who are done to). Perhaps most shockingly, when the researchers examined how this language has changed over time, they found that it hadn’t.
Veteran tennis player Venus Williams, who recently returned to the court after a 16-month layoff, has been granted a wild card entry to next month’s Cincinnati Open. A seven-time major champion, the 45-year-old became the oldest player to win a WTA singles match since 2004 when she defeated fellow American and world No. 35 Peyton Stearns at the Washington Open on Tuesday.
U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi told President Donald Trump he was named multiple times in the Epstein files at a routine briefing in May, the Wall Street Journal reported Wednesday, citing unnamed senior administration officials, though just last week Trump denied Bondi said he was named in the documents, the latest turn of a quickly escalating White House crisis. |
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 | 2. Rethink your office romance policy. The viral Coldplay concert video, showing former Astronomer CEO Andy Byron and his HR chief Kristin Cabot caught in an intimate moment, was viewed by over 100 million people. The incident has provoked a lot of conversation around office romances, and it’s worth noting that organizational bans on workplace romance may have the unintended effect of making these relationships even more tempting. Researchers have found that forbidding something can increase desire, simply because it’s off-limits. |
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| | The meme stock craze is alive and well this week, with some investors juicing companies that are otherwise struggling, or that spark nostalgia. One analyst warns that when trading meme stocks, “[Y]ou’re not investing in fundamentals, you’re betting on crowd psychology.” Which of the following is not a meme stock seeing atypical gains this week? | | A. | Blockbuster | | B. | Kohl’s | | C. | GoPro | | D. | Krispy Kreme |
| | Check if you got it right here. |
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| Join today’s most influential women at the 2025 Forbes Power Women’s Summit on September 10. This year’s event will feature Sara Blakely, the founder of Spanx & Sneex, Susie Wolff, managing director of F1 Academy, Lucy Guo, founder and CEO of Passes, and more! Be in the room where leaders are shaping the future of business, culture and innovation. Learn more here. |
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