Consumer complaint received 2021-04-05
Product: Student loan — Private student loan
Issue: Dealing with your lender or servicer — Problem with customer service
Company: CITIZENS FINANCIAL GROUP, INC. (MO)

I co-signed my wife 's {$3500.00} student loan through Citizens Bank as she was finishing up her final year of college. She graduated in XX/XX/XXXX, which means the repayment started in XX/XX/XXXX. She went online to establish auto-payments for her loans. Citizens Bank does not coalesce their loans into one payment ; no, that would be too easy for the consumers. Instead, my wife had to set up auto-pay at least three separate times, once for each different loan she had to take during her years in college. I personally have students loans through two other lenders that are not Citizens Bank, and my wife has another lender outside of Citizens Bank. In our experience, Citizens Bank is the only one that breaks up repayment in this fashion by default. 

My wife set up auto-pay which appeared to be working as we started receiving " Thank you for your Payment '' emails in XXXX with payments coming out on XX/XX/XXXX and XX/XX/XXXX. It wasn't until months later that we found out we overlooked setting up auto-pay for one of the several loans that were taken out over the years. Citizens Bank did not notify me until they put the loan in delinquency. No mail notification, no emails ( only the " Thank you for your payment '' again in XX/XX/XXXX, XX/XX/XXXX, XX/XX/XXXX ) no phone calls, until the loan is now delinquent. We had full intention and means to repay this loan, but their website and their repayment system is not intuitive and not user-friendly. 

XX/XX/XXXX, Citizens Bank mailed out a letter indicating the loan is delinquent, which I received on XX/XX/XXXX. Upon getting home from work on XX/XX/XXXX, I immediately set out to remedy the situation, but ending up on the phone with XXXX because I could not navigate the website to find where the one loan that is delinquent versus the rest that were properly configured with auto-pay. XXXX Customer Service was able to navigate me to the correct loan and I promptly paid the current balance. 

After this negative experience, I did not want to give XXXX Bank any more interest off of that loan, so on XX/XX/XXXX I went back and paid off the remaining balance of the entire loan. I then called XXXX XXXX to file a contention of the delinquent report to the credit bureaus as this issue came up solely by the unorthodox nature of repayment for multiple loans, lack of meaningful communication that one of the loans was not being paid, and an unintuitive website that required a call to customer service to successfully navigate. 

XX/XX/XXXX, Citizens Bank denied my contention for credit reporting adjustment based on the fact they " do not offer courtesy credit report retractions. '' This entire issue stems from Citizens Bank. My wife and I tried to follow the rules, and we had repayment activity across our account, but Citizens Bank 's website made it extraordinarily difficult to establish and verify proper repayment when you have multiple loans with them. This should not be a matter of a " courtesy '' retraction but a matter of " sorry for our blistering incompetence to make a consumer-friendly repayment scheme and intuitive website. ''