SLB to accept loan payments online by year-end

Clients of the Students’ Loan Bureau (SLB) will be able to make their loan payments online before the end of this year.

Deputy Executive Director, Charmaine Rose Anderson, said online payments will be facilitated via the Strategic Transformation of End-users Experience Portal (STEEP), also known as the customer portal.

“Students will be able to make payments directly from the portal using their debit or credit card; that is a wonderful new feature for the customers. You don’t need to be coming into SLB… [or] going to Paymaster to make a payment.” Mrs Rose Anderson said.

She said the SLB decided to institute the arrangement after analysing the relevant data.

“We noticed that information over the years showed that the number of customers… making these payments by cash… [is] very small. Everybody is using a debit or credit card, moreso a debit card. So right on [our] portal, you can make your payments using your debit and credit cards,” she noted.

The Deputy Executive Director said the interface for the payment option will be simple and similar to other existing portals.

“If you make your payments on the Jamaica Public Service’s (JPS) My Pay [platform] with your debit or credit card, the look and feel will be very similar. The system is not fully implemented as yet, as we are doing it in phases. But… long before December, all customers will be able to make their payments by the customer portal,” she told reporters.

Meanwhile, the SLB will shortly be offering the option of making loan payments directly on its website.

“That is a further development, and we are in discussion with our web developers at the Jamaica Information Service (JIS) to add that feature,” the Deputy Executive Director said.

She noted that this new feature will enable persons to make loan payments on behalf of borrowers.

“If I need to make a payment for my daughter, and I do not have a portal account because I don’t have a loan from the SLB, I can go to the website to make the payments on behalf of my daughter. So, there’s a difference. The portal account is for customers of SLB. On the website, everybody can make payment on behalf of customers, whether or not they themselves are customers,” Mrs Rose Anderson explained.

To make a payment on behalf of a customer on the website, she advised that the person only needs the customer’s loan account number.

“They don’t have to share their Tax Registration Number (TRN) or personal information, just the loan account number and then [they] can make a payment on behalf of any customer,” she noted.

-JIS NEWS-

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