Candidly Sells College Finance Marketplace; Accelerates AI Expansion

College Finance Marketplace Acquired by NerdWallet; Candidly Customers Retain Full Access as Company Accelerates AI Platform Development

Candidly, the category-leading AI-native debt-to-wealth optimization platform, announced the sale of its College Finance marketplace. The transaction reflects Candidly’s successful corporate strategy and continued evolution into a multi-agentic technology platform providing personalized, holistic financial guidance at scale.

Candidly customers and partners will continue to have full, uninterrupted access to the marketplace, its current functionality, and its comprehensive private student loan and student loan refinancing options.

The divestiture accelerates Candidly’s technology investment following the successful launch and growing market demand of Cait, its Conversational AI tool, and the Candidly Intelligence Center (CIC), the multi-agentic system that powers Cait. Financial institutions can configure and deploy Cait and/or the CIC under their own brand, with flexible integration options — from a turnkey platform for enterprise-wide deployment to modular AI agents that plug directly into existing systems.

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“This decisive action bolsters our investment in building the category-defining, multi-agentic AI infrastructure for the financial services industry,” said Laurel Taylor, Founder and CEO of Candidly. “By embedding our AI capabilities where people work, bank, and experience financial services, we give employers and financial institutions a faster path to unlocking their data and distribution advantages, accelerating both speed-to-market and speed-to-value, while simultaneously fueling our mission to help hardworking Americans move from debt to wealth.”

Early deployment data for Cait and the CIC reflects strong user engagement: 71% of users take action when Cait suggests a next step, 49% of conversations reach the action stage, and 41% of conversations extend to six or more messages, indicating users are engaging Cait to work through complex financial decisions.

“Our results reflect what is possible when AI-enabled financial guidance is engineered to be true, trusted and actionable,” said Ben Levine, Chief Product Officer at Candidly. “We’re doubling down on the platform that enables the world’s largest financial institutions to deploy AI directly to their customers. Consumer-facing AI in financial services has to clear three bars: domain expertise compliance teams trust, deterministic modeling risk teams can approve, and configuration to how each partner does business. We’ve built a platform that clears all three. This transaction accelerates our expansion.”

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Candidly continues to provide the deep subject matter expertise users need to confidently navigate the full spectrum of higher education-related financial decisions, across the more than 50% of U.S. households that navigate this multi-decade journey. The agents that address education financing (college planning, student debt repayment, student loan retirement match) are now among a larger library of agents such as 401k and equity, with a roadmap that includes roll overs all the way to decumulation.

“Candidly’s mission has always been to help users go beyond debt, into wealth,” said Taylor. “Our use of AI has dramatically accelerated our ability to deliver on that promise through agents that address complex financial decisions across liabilities and assets simultaneously. It’s all about impact, and we’re all in.”

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