Using Climb Credit's Application Integration to Improve Student and School Experience
Many Climb partners have often asked if they can integrate their online cart with Climb’s loan application. One such school decided to take the steps to integrate their enrollment process deeply with Climb’s financing solutions and increase access for applicants. By offering Climb’s alternative payment options to prospective learners looking to enroll in their courses, they can reach more people who otherwise wouldn’t have been able to afford tuition. In fact, to date our partnership has helped 7,800 learners receive training and enter new — or grow in their current — careers. However, this partner has also been able to expand the reach even further (and improve the student experience) by integrating Climb’s application with their own. Below, we’ll take a closer look at the implementation and impact of Climb’s application integration.
What is Climb Credit's application integration?
There are two parts to our integration: first, a single API on climbcredit.com that takes the applicant’s details from the school’s application and returns the URL for a Climb application with the applicant’s details pre-populated. Instead of a Climb loan taking a speedy 5 minutes, it now only takes on average 2.5 minutes! This way, we can improve the user journey, on-boarding, and handoff from the school to Climb. Additionally, it also includes a reporting infrastructure to integrate loan approval status data about Climb borrowers with school systems. This helps schools to understand which of their learners have financing all set, and which ones still need to secure a payment option.
To speed up the integration, we can provide a simple JavaScript function (<10 lines of code) that schools can embed in their client app wherever it makes sense to do so within their prospective students’ journey. If schools are interested in using a test environment prior to implementation, we can also provide a sample standalone HTML page that has example applications sent to our demo school.
The first step in a Climb integration is a meeting between our product and technical teams to understand your user journey and determine the place — or places — where the integration will best help students. Once the integration on the school side is past this initial development scoping stage, we’ll provide links to our test environment where schools can safely test the integration.
How has one partner school utilized Climb’s integration?
When a prospective student is enrolling in a training course, they will have the option to utilize a Climb payment method and add it to their cart upon checkout. If they choose to add Climb financing, they will be taken to the Climb application, pre-filled with the details they had already entered during their school enrollment — including name, contact information, and course title/start date. This way, applicants won’t have to go to the Climb website separately and re-enter what they had already typed in.
Benefits of integrating our applications
Installing our integration allows your students to move directly from your online application to a Climb application that is pre-populated with the student and program information that they enter on your website, which can make the loan process up to 90% faster for your students! Additionally, you can experience:
- Easier process for the school — there’s no need to manually match student names to application numbers or clarify discrepancies in information between our respective applications. Our application integration ensures easy and accurate data reconciliation between your and Climb’s back-offices.
- Simpler process for your students — our integration minimizes the information needed to be entered. In some cases, the only information the applicant needs to enter again is their Social Security Number (SSN)!
- Increased speed — an integrated application can be completed up to 90% faster, and an approval offer is more likely to be accepted by the applicant.
Increased accuracy — reducing the number of times information has to be re-input by students can decrease the number manual errors. - Improved back-office efficiency — Climb’s application integration ensures easy and accurate data reconciliation between your and Climb’s back-offices.