Amendment 2 - Industry Day Recording Transcript.pdf

Casey Wade: Welcome, folks. We are excited to be hosting you today for the FSA Tech Modernization Industry Day. Please keep yourself muted and keep the camera off until instructed otherwise. Now, please welcome the director of Digital Services and Product Management, Kaegy Pabulos.

Kaegy Pabulos: Thank you, Casey. Welcome, everyone. I hope each of you are having a good morning. Thank you, and we appreciate your time for joining us at today's Industry Day. Heard a lot of questions from each of you, and we wanted to utilize this time in two parts. One, to really set context about our current state challenges and where we want to head through FSA Tech Modernization. And then the second half is to make sure that we dedicate time to be able to answer your questions for each of the sections of the RFI that we posted. We will first hear from executive leadership here at Federal Student Aid, and then we'll turn our attention to a moderated question and answer that goes through each section's RFI. If we don't have time, or if we run out of time to answer each of your questions, we do encourage you to email FSATechModernization@ed.gov. That's FSATechModernization@ed.gov, and we'll respond to your questions as soon as possible. So again, thank you very much for spending time with us. I will now want to yield the floor to our head of acquisitions, Calvin Mitchell.

Calvin Mitchell: Thank you, Kaegy. I would like to discuss strategic acquisitions and vendor management. Strategic acquisitions and vendor management are pivotal to achieving FSA's modernization goals. We thank you for your support here and to support some of our goals. And to support these specific goals of strategic acquisition management and vendor management, FSA is going to pursue acquisition approaches that consolidate and duplicate duplicative contracts, introduce performance-based incentives, and leverage competition and promote innovation. Now, consolidating and streamlining contracts will help us to reduce the fragmentation that we experience by consolidating overlapping contracts and services where it's appropriate. Now, by leveraging performance-based contracting, FSA contracts will include robust performance matrix and incentives to align vendors efforts with FSA's modernization outcomes. Moving on. Contract life cycle alignment.

To avoid modernization efforts being stymied by contract timing issues, aligning major IT initiatives with procurement life cycle will be integral in making sure that we are successful. And then it comes back to cost efficiency and competition, streamlining contracts to achieve cost savings. We're going to be able to seek economies of scale by building requirements in such a way that we are able to get cloud services, software licenses, and other common goods and services across the programs. This also will help us to invigorate competition. No longer will we be in vendor lock, we'll be able to have more robust competition across the enterprise. We're going to be strengthening contract oversight.

Internally, we're going to be bolstering our acquisition management capabilities to oversee vendors more effectively. It's amazing when you look back and we see what great work has been done at FSA.

We spent $1.8 billion last year in contract support to help us to fulfill the mission. Elizabeth is going to be coming up soon, and she'll be talking a little bit about small business and this idea of vendor management. And so we thank you so much for your participation, and we look forward to supporting you.

Kaegy Pabulos: Thank you, Calvin. Now I wanted to yield the floor to Elizabeth Walker from our Small Business office.

Elizabeth Walker: Good morning. So we're so excited to be chatting with you today. And as we just heard Calvin talking about strategic acquisitions, I want to take a minute to see where do small businesses play in that. Small businesses have a very important part of the process when we're looking at what this procurement strategy is going to look like, we want to look at the innovations that you can bring to it. FSA relies on a numerous number of contractors from systems, to large IT integrators, to loan-servicing companies. And we have to look at streamlining these arrangements to reduce complexity and cost. So in fact, when we're talking to FSA leadership, we're seeing that our current legal and contractual environment is making it really hard to modernize. So that's where we need you. We want to continue to look at what opportunities can we break apart acquisitions. How can we do small business set asides within our needs so we can make sure that we have the most competitive environment possible. When we look at what opportunities are available in federal student aid with small businesses, they're massive. Last year in FY24, we had $192 million be awarded to small businesses to support the mission. And how that stacks out for our entire agency, that represents about 42 percent of the agency. So the decisions we're making here matter, and they're going to have a really big impact. I look forward to seeing you guys participate.

Amendment 2 - FSA’s Technology Modernization Industry Day Recording Transcript

Kaegy Pabulos: Thank you, Elizabeth. Now I want to introduce to you all our chief technology officer, Davon Tyler.

Davon Tyler: Good morning and welcome to Federal Student Aid Industry Day. I'm Davon Tyler, the acting CTO, and I'd like to thank each and every one of you for being here, whether you represent a Fortune 500 integrator, a cutting-edge startup, a team of engineers ready to tackle the next big challenge. Today's more than a briefing, it's an invitation. An invitation to co-create the future of secure, resilient digital services for millions of students and families across the country. Federal Student Aid is undergoing a profound transformation. We're modernizing not just our technology stack, but our entire process of service delivery, data protection, and operational resilience. At the heart of this effort, a strategic enabler of trust, access, and innovation. We recently issued an RFI to gather insight capabilities and bold ideas across the industry. This RFI is not a formality, it's a signal.

A signal that we're listening, that we value expertise and that we're committed to building a partnership with the vendor community. I want to speak directly to a few of you. To the executives of large business. You understand scale, you deliver complex solutions across federal agencies. We're looking to you not just for capacity, but strategic alignment. How can your platform frameworks and delivery models help us to accelerate modernization while maintaining security, ensuring accountability, and reducing operational cost. We invite you to bring your best thinking and not just your best products. To technical experts, you're the architect, the analysts, the engineers, the ones who turn vision into reality. Or RFI aligns key areas where your expertise is critical. We want to hear how you're solving these problems in the field and how you automate enabling delivery enterprise services at a speed that the public desires. This is your chance to shape the technical requirements.

To small business, you're the heartbeat of innovation. Your agility, creativity and community-driven approaches are essential to solving problems that the legacy systems often struggle with. We want you to know -- we want to know how your capabilities, team and strategies, unique perspectives can help us deliver secure, scalable, and cost effective solutions. So today, I encourage you all to engage fully, ask bold questions, share your insights, challenge your assumptions. Whether your goal is to picture a solution or simply learn more about our mission, your voice matters. Like our bars, we seek to pay off debt, technical debt, that has been growing for years, by working with industry to innovate and re-imagine the student aid experience. Please also keep in mind that as we innovate, we also want to reduce costs that it takes to sustain the environment. Let's make this day count, not just for the sake of a procurement, but for the millions of students and families that rely on us to get it right.

Thank you for being here. Let's build the next iteration of the Federal Student Aid experience together.

Kaegy Pabulos: Thank you, Davon. Now we'll head to make sure we get context around Federal Student Aid systems and our environment. So on that note, I wanted to introduce Jason Babic.

Jason Babic: Thanks, Kaegy. Good morning, my name is Jason Babic. I'm FSAs enterprise architect within the Office of the Chief Technology Officer, and I'm going to walk you through a high level of FSA's current state, starting with the business view, followed by systems to support the business and a focused look at the customer experience and the direct loans. So next slide, please. This slide shows a high level representation of our aid life cycle, which has four phases, which are awareness, application, disbursement, and repayment. First phase is awareness, where the customer includes students, parents, and borrowers that are interested in FSA services, and they go to FSAs digital front door, studentaid.gov, to understand the services that we provide and products that could be provided to them. The application phase is the second phase of the aid life cycle, where the customer applies for Title IV aid by using the free application for Federal Student Aid that is primarily done digitally through the studentaid.gov website and also can be supported by mail. FSA provides the FAFSA submission summary to each customer that summarizes their FAFSA information and provides basic information about their eligibility. FAFSA: FSA provides the institutional student information record to schools, that contain processed student information reported on the FAFSA form in the National Student Loan Data System financial aid history information. FAFSA information is shared with these schools listed on the FAFSA form. The financial aid offices at these schools use the information to figure out how much federal student aid customers may receive. Customers apply to schools by understanding each school's admission requirements, paying any necessary fees, submitting an application for attendance. So the customers have two different applications, one for financial aid and one for admission to a college. Third phase is the disbursement phase, where schools administer the delivery of aid to customers through a financial aid package. The package could contain State and/or institutional aid, direct loans, federal work study, and/or grants. Federal loans are money borrowed for schools that must be repaid with interest. Direct loans is a US Department of Education's Federal Student Aid loan program where FSA is the lender. The fourth phase is repayment. FSA works with customers to help them select the right repayment plan, learn how to make payments, and get help if they cannot afford their payments, and what circumstances may result in forgiveness. The Family Federal Education lenders are private organizations that handle customer loan billing and repayment for Family Federal Education Loans. In certain circumstances, customers can have their federal student loans forgiven canceled or discharged. We also have Perkins services or Perkins portfolio, and we have services for our Health Education Assistance Loans, our HEAL portfolio. So our three portfolios that no longer disburse aid, that we have to continue to service, but our main portfolios for direct loans that we have to service and repay, however the customers repay them. This slide was not previously published with the RFI, but will be made available afterwards. This diagram shows the major systems supporting the aid life cycle. So on the top of the chart, you see the four aid life cycle phases I just reviewed. Below that, you see white boxes that have different widths based upon whether they support the phases above them, right. So certain systems are wide and certain systems are not as wide, and that's just because that indicates whether they support that aid life cycle phase or not. So high level -- and then there's black lines between the systems that show that there are interfaces between a system. So that means that data is being shared between the systems, and that's likely not just one flow, it's multiple interfaces or APIs. It's just a simplified view to give someone an understanding of the complexity of IT architecture and how the systems interact. The high-level statistics about our system inventory. On this chart, you don't see all of our systems, but we have 67 systems in Federal Student Aid. 28 of those systems are cloud service providers. 63 of those systems are operational and foreign development. This diagram also was not published with the RFI, but will be made available afterwards. Next slide, please. This diagram is a complex view which we call the customer system context diagram, and it tells a story of the customer's experience in relation to the aid life cycle and the systems that they use. The customers interact primarily with the digital customer care system. It says DCC, so we have acronyms on these slides, and they'll be made available a couple slides from now. So the digital customer care system is at FSAs digital front door, and the customer interacts with that primarily to get their FSA ID, to learn about our programs, to submit the FAFSA digitally. But they primarily work with the federal loan servicers that you can see on the bottom right of this chart, to make loan payments through the services website via phone or by mail. This diagram that we're presenting here today was revised slightly by replacing an icon on the bottom left, because we're changing the way that we're doing collections. And so this box, Number 13, was revised, and this information will be made available after this vendor day. Key points on this chart is, over the last five to eight years, we've significantly streamlined the customer experience.

Five to eight years ago, we had many more systems that the customers had to interact with, and we've done a lot of consolidation into DCC, but there's more opportunity to integrate loan servicer functions into our digital front door as part of our unified borrower portal. COD, the COD system, common origination disbursement, and the federal loan servicers, send correspondence to the customer as part of their experience. If the customer goes to default, they will receive default resolution information from the debt-management collection system. I can make payments through DMCs or pay.gov. Next slide, please. This is a direct loan system context diagram. This diagram shows basically what happens with direct loans in relation to our aid life cycle in the systems, and it's primarily focused around the federal loan servicers, for which we have five. Federal loan servicers handle the billing and other services associated with federal direct loans, and the federal loan consolidation originator is the federal loan servicer that assists loan consolidation efforts. This diagram was not changed with what we published with the RFI, so this was not revised. So what's on sam.gov is what's presented here today. Key points here is that the common origination and disbursement system assigns the new direct loans to the federal loan servicer. The servicers communicate with the customers through a welcome letter. Servicers will receive payments from the customers and report loans and financial data to several FSA systems, including COD, common origination disbursement system, the National Student Loan Data System, and FSA's financial management system. Customers may consolidate multiple loans into one. When this happens, one servicer will be selected as a loan consolidator, consolidation originator, excuse me, who will work with the necessary servicers to close the multiple loans and originate a new loan. If a loan is defaulted, the servicer will assign the loan to debt management collection system, and rehabilitated loans will be transferred back to the servicer. That concludes my comments. The next slide is a listing of acronyms that can be referenced to help you understand the diagrams and what the system names are. I'm going to hand them back to Kaegy. Thank you.

Kaegy Pabulos: Jason, thank you. Just as -- wanted to repeat what Jason said in here. These diagrams that we're showing in here alongside this deck will be provided via an amendment to sam.gov after the industry day. We will also be sharing the recording on sam.gov, as well, via an amendment. So please make sure and we're all aware that this information will be useful as you continue to respond to the requests for information that we provided. One thing to note, again, we are recording, so please do note you are being recorded, questions and answers. This allows for us to just make sure that we have a resource available to each of you that collates these questions and answers afterwards. We will now use this time to transition slightly to our questions and answers with our panel. So I'll be inviting our [inaudible 00:18:53] here, who will be participating, to move in. I appreciate again, thank you, Calvin, Elizabeth, Davon, Jason, for the contact setting that you provided for us. So we'll transition now. As we are transitioning, I do want to give a nod to our subject matter experts across Federal Student Aid. We have a few who are joining us online, so do want to give them the opportunity to go online on camera and say hello. So we have Ryan, Steve, Drew, and Nate wanting to give you a floor to just introduce yourselves quickly to us. We'll start first with Ryan, then with Drew, then with Nate, and then with Steve.

Ryan Yaworski: Thanks, Kaegy. Good morning. My name is Ryan Yaworski. I'm part of the data office at FSA. I'm the director of the statistical research and modeling group, which is basically just a small team of data scientists. Thanks.

Drew Wolf: Hello, I'm Drew Wolf. I am the director of our technology office, under the CTO.

Kaegy Pabulos: Nate, and then Steve.

Nathan Call: Yep. Thank you. Hi. My name's Nate Call. I am a software engineer within the digital service.

Steve Matteson: Good morning, all. My name's Steve Matteson. I'm an advisor for the chief technology officer, and I work with the CTO, CSO, and other division chiefs, to ensure collaboration across the tech offices. Thanks.

Kaegy Pabulos: Thank you. Ryan, Steve, Drew, and Nate will be joined by our in-house panel here in the room with us. We will be doing a structured question and answer across the sections of the RFI that was posted, and then we'll end with questions about acquisitions. We will be spending roughly around ten minutes to give us time to hopefully dig through some of the questions that you have and then answer them. Again, if we run out of time and if we cannot answer questions, please e-mail FSATechModernization@ed.gov. We will start first with current state and challenges. Casey Wade, who is online, will help us facilitate and make sure if you raise your hands, we will call you by order.

When your name gets called, please just say your name, your company name, and then your question. So again, our first section is current state and challenges. Casey.

Casey Wade: Alright, folks. So you should be able to raise your hands. So the way you're going to do that is you should see a raised-hand icon, and you should go ahead and be able to click right on that.

I've put in the chat what that icon looks like. Now, if you're saying to yourself, I don't see a raised-hand icon, it might be under your more button. I'm also going to real -- well, I don't want to actually -- I don't want to share over anybody. But if you'd like to raise your hand and ask a question, go ahead and do that. If for some reason you're unable to, please let me know in the chat. Let's see here.

Anybody who would like to raise their hand and ask any questions on the current state and challenges? I'm waiting to see any hands go up. Not seeing any yet. And once again, if you're unable to raise your hand, please let me know in the chat. Not seeing anything at this -- oh, note that somebody just waiting to come in. Not seeing anything, Kaegy.

Kaegy Pabulos: Thank you, Casey. So we can always turn back to this section. We'll go into the next section, Overall modernization strategy and architecture.

Casey Wade: Alright, I got a couple hands now. Robert, looks like. And I apologize, folks, in advance, if I don't get your last names right. Robert, looks like Antonucci. Would you like to go ahead and unmute yourself and go -- if you'd like, you can also go -- turn on your camera and ask your question. Are you able to unmute Robert?

Robert Antonucci: There. Now I can unmute.

Casey Wade: There you go.

Robert Antonucci: Thank you. Robert Antonucci with Focus Consulting. On the modernization, I was curious if FSA could provide some sort of initial prioritization of the systems for modernization to help -

- so we can better sequence potential modernation phases. We would hate to focus on what you see as the least in need.

Kaegy Pabulos: Thank you, Robert. On that, I'll actually invite our CTO, Davon Tyler, to answer that question.

Davon Tyler: So that's a unique question. So just to kind of make sure everyone kind of heard, prioritization. And so, really, we want to leave that up to industry. We're going to work with our partners, we're going to look into responses that we received. We did not want to pigeonhole responses. It is something internally that we're looking into, like how do we prioritize and what things are more important than others. But the reality of it is, too, is what I told the team in our strategy, is that we do not want mass movement. So we don't want what we've done in the past, is there's a huge evolution of activities and potentially that's a huge risk. And so we're going to look into strategies that kind of focus on how do we make an integral approach to modernizing over time and bringing solutions up that makes sense in ways that are not big massive movements for the organization. So again, at this point, no real priorities, really just looking for industry to help us provide ideas, suggestions, solutions. And then from there, we'll take that into account and prioritize how we move forward. So answer your question more specifically. No priortization. From your standpoint, please dream big, tell us your ideas, and we'll take those, and then we'll prioritize from there.

Kaegy Pabulos: Thank you, Davon. I do want to invite if there are other [inaudible 00:25:58] panelists who'd like to add on to what Davon said. Okay. Thank you, Robert. Casey, next.

Casey Wade: Alright. Up next, I believe I have Wayne Rogers. Wayne Rogers, feel free to go ahead and unmute yourself.

Wayne Rodgers: Alright. Can everyone hear me just to make sure?

Casey Wade: Sure can.

Wayne Rodgers: Alright, thanks. This is Wayne. I'm from Saliense Consulting, and I have a two-part question. As far as modernization goes, for the first part I have, would modernization potentially include NGDC modernization, such as migrating data centers for FSA into the cloud? And the second part to that question would be, understanding some massive contracts like USDS were awarded in the last two years, would FSA consider using common providers for cybersecurity, such as for the servicers and NGDC, so that everyone's using kind of like a single provider for a different solution, whether it's policy enforcement points, identity, so on and so forth?

Kaegy Pabulos: Okay. Do you want to invite for that question, Davon, Steve, and Drew to help answer the question.

Davon Tyler: I'll go first, and then I'll [inaudible 00:27:06] Drew, then Steve, and Fernando. First of all, on the question, NGDC transition. Again, this RFI is open to any and all solutions. So consolidation of clouds, again, as Calvin mentioned earlier, too, we're looking into how do we reduce redundancy.

Cloud is one of those areas where we have a redundancy stack. Second part, are we looking for enterprise or -- we are definitely looking to unique approaches that allows us to reduce, as I said earlier, too, minimize the O&M cost. The reality of it is, is that building piecemeal solutions can become, and we've seen it internally into FSA, becomes very expensive. So if there are solutions that help us to consolidate, whether that be from the cloud standpoint, cybersecurity services, we're definitely interested into it. I do want to say that the cybersecurity work itself is separate from this.

The innovation and building of technology is going to evolve into this, and we'll see how we integrate the cybersecurity labor piece into this as well, too. But from enterprise tools support cyber, this is definitely in scope of this RFI, how do we deploy tools, [inaudible 00:28:09] to scale, as well as reduce costs for Federal Student Aid.

Kaegy Pabulos: Drew, Steve, and Fernando. So let's go with Drew first, and then Steve and Fernando afterwards for Question number 2.

Drew Wolf: Thank you, Kaegy. As far as migrating out of physical data center into a cloud-centric environment, we already have a lot of different applications that have moved that way or started to move that way. That is definitely our vision and our goal, is to move towards the cloud as we modernize. So yes. In answer to your question, yes, we are looking at how to make that happen.

Steve.

Steve Matteson: And I do think people covered it well, but I will say, you know, as we look at single vendors across different contracts and look at what we've currently released that are relatively new, I don't think those are out of the game or out of the play for options, as the option here has come up. I think we have complete open minds to what the suggestions are here. Fernando.

Fernando DeAlmeida: Good question there, Wayne. I would add to what Davon said that security needs to be part of the initial thinking of that transition. Trying to retrofit security can be a problem, so my advice would be, yes, we're going to do it, and Davon said earlier, we cannot do everything at once. It has to be a phased approach, and someone else, it was a great question, asked about prioritization. Even from security and transition, we have to prioritize what can you do, how we do it, and always keeping in mind what's the desired state. And with that in mind, you know the desired state. You start with security as part of the plan to transition to the cloud. So that way, I think we can grow, we can scale, and that's one of the main challenges, achieving the economy of scale without jeopardizing cybersecurity.

Kaegy Pabulos: Thank you for that question, Casey, back to you.

Casey Wade: It looks like my next person up is Jubal Biggs.

Jubal Biggs: Hey, guys. This is Jubal from T-Rex Solutions. I'm a solutions architect. I found the overall strategy question interesting, really kind of asking about greenfield versus leveraging existing solutions. It seems to me that you're looking at a lot of very broad solutions, and I'm curious if you would like to elaborate on any of the major pain points and issues in a broad sense that have led to looking at a wide range of modernization solutions here.

Kaegy Pabulos: For that question, again, I'll invite our CTO. I think Davon should just stand up here, but Davon Tyler and then afterwards also to Sean Cassidy and Nate Call, who's joining us online. So Davon first.

Davon Tyler: That's a great question. I've been here for a little over three years. If you look at some of the news, we struggle with some of the things in the past, whether or not that was fast or other initiatives that we had here. We've just been very successful in rolling out new capabilities, but again, it's been relatively a struggle to deploy new capabilities. I'm assuming you all kind of saw on the challenges, why we probably didn't see any questions there, too, because my assumption is that we were very clear with the challenges that we had out there and what we're trying to resolve. From our standpoint, we wanted to tell you-all that we're open to any and every idea, and that means that we have to have an environment that we sustain what we currently have while we build new, and we're willing to do that. If there's an environment where we can build onto what we currently have, we're willing to do that. We're open to starting from scratch. We're open to new ideas that allows us to have a Federal Student Aid that we control, and that our technical team is very much involved with and we're driving it forward, versus how we piecemeal things together, too. We're also open to building on who what we have. Again, the goal is not to to pigeonhole your response into, it must be this, because if you do come with a new idea where you say, hey, look, we want to start from scratch, and we believe you can start from scratch and build in these capabilities. Commercial capabilities are already out there that you can use to integrate. It's going to help you reduce cost complexity, and help you to rebuild Federal Student Aid so we can deliver the experience consistently. We're open to that.

Hopefully, that's very clear to you answer, that, again, if your response is, Davon, we can tell you how to rebuild this thing from scratch and here's a better way to do it and you own your future and deploy it in a way that's consistent to what the bars and the students and families expect, then we're open to

it. If there's a way to build what we currently have and improve services, we're open to that, as well.

Hopefully, that answers your question.

Kaegy Pabulos: Nate, I do want to give you the opportunity to add to that, and then I'll invite Sean to talk through from really our end users. Students, parents, borrowers, I know we'll go through this, as well, perspectives on what's driving our organization. Nate?

Nathan Call: Thank you, Kaegy, and thanks, Davon. I think you summarized that very, very well. Just to add to some of your comments regarding making really large shifts and deliveries all at once.

That's something that we do want to fundamentally avoid. We want to move to the more modern approach and standard practice of CICD, continuous integration, continuous delivery, for our products and platforms. So, again, we welcome all your feedback and suggestions here, but we want to focus on being able to continually deliver incrementally throughout our products and platforms to ensure that things are done in a stable way that don't impact other systems negatively, and that are focused on outcomes for our customers, our students. At the end of the day, we're here to ensure that they get the aid that they need to get to school, and we want to do that incrementally and carefully.

Thanks.

Kaegy Pabulos: Thanks, Nate. Sean? Please introduce yourself.

Sean Cassidy: Good morning, all. My name is Sean Cassidy. I'm a UX designer on the FSA digital service team. As Davon and Nate mentioned, I can speak to a little bit about the user experience or customer experience side. We have made great strides in solving the fragmented experiences across systems. There are some disparate experiences that still exists. For example, we have students that apply for FAFSA on student.gov, but we have student loan borrowers that are serviced by five different websites on the repayment side. We are looking at trying to create more uniformity and consistent experiences across the entire Student Aid life cycle. And there are complications also with some of how our data is not exactly accessible in every single system and every interaction. We do have limitations there. We are looking for ideas about how we can improve that fragmented experience to really deliver a world class user experience, but also to improve our ability for borrowers to successfully repay their loans in time. Thank you.

Kaegy Pabulos: Thank you. Anyone else from our panel who want to add into that? Online as well.

Casey, back to you.

Casey Wade: Up next, we have Ron Hodges.

Ron Hodges: Good morning, everyone. Can you hear me?

Kaegy Pabulos: Yes, we can.

Ron Hodges: Excellent. I'm Ron Hodges. I'm Cloud solution architect from IBM. I've had the privilege of working with Federal Student Aid in various capacities, starting in 1999, although, I know I don't look that old. I have a couple of questions. First of all, what is the timeframe that you all envision for a modernization to occur beginning sometime, presumably, next year? And then continuing on, do you have, in mind, a length of time that you hope to achieve most of your objectives here? Related to that, what constraints does FAFSA open enrollment each year have on that modernization effort? I have an additional question that I'll toss in there for extra points. That would be whether FSA owns all the source code for the systems that are part of your portfolio. Thank you very much.

Kaegy Pabulos: I'll have Davon first, and then Drew and Nate afterwards answer that question.

Davon Tyler: And Ron, I'm going to say, you're not on camera anymore, but you do not look that old, so I'll just confirm that.

Ron Hodges: Thank you, Davon.

Davon Tyler: Time frame. Again, Nate mentioned, I mentioned, too, we're not looking for a big bank.

So this is going to happen over the next several years, probably out until '28. We're now looking to, again, taking responses and feedback from industry and then building that into student's roadmap, our plan to move this out in a way. That's the second part of your question, how does FAFSA impact?

It doesn't. It's only built into the strategy and the plan. Again, we're not going to move out while the capabilities does not take account for our premium products at FAFSA and other services that we have. We want to make sure as we deploy this that it's very integral in nature. To this point that we have CICD, and that it is very scalable, and it supports what we're trying to do operationally as well as what we're trying to do strategically. So, again, those things will be taken into account. This is something that we're doing as a unified FSA. You may see technology here through acquisition. All of the FSA is involved into this. So this is going to be a unified approach to how we deliver new capabilities and services to the business while working with the business to deploy those capabilities.

So again, FAFSA [inaudible 00:38:59] they're going to be directly involved with the work that we do.

I'll make sure I answer your follow-up question. Do we own all the source code? I've answered that today. No. So no, we do not own all the source code to all FSA.

Kaegy Pabulos: Drew and Nate, there is also a question around open availability, and then I'll open it up to the panel here afterwards. Drew, Nate?

Drew Wolf: I think one of the questions, if I understood correctly there, Ron, was around the timing of this, but there's two aspects of that. How often can we make changes? Obviously, we have very key delivery points with our FAFSA opening up on/or before October 1st. Our goals around that are very cyclical, so we want to make sure we manage changes around those. But how fast we actually execute these, that depends on how big of a modernization we're looking at taking on those. Nate?

Nathan Call: Thanks, Drew. I would just say, adding to Drew's answer there on the timelines with the open enrollment on FAFSA, that those deadlines are fixed, which might seem a little bit contrary to the CICD goals that we want to put in place. But I know internally when we talk about that, we often refer to the FAFSA launch days. We want to get to a place where that feels like any other day, that it's not a special or unique day. It just happens to be the day that FAFSA is opened. But ultimately, our deployments are just like any other day.

Kaegy Pabulos: I do want to invite anyone in here from our panel to stand up and then introduce themselves first and then respond to your questions.

Sierra Brandt: Hi, folks. Sierra Brandt, the team lead of the digital services team, and also a product manager by trade. And I'll say, I totally understand where the question comes from. Timelines are important, right? But I think we should fundamentally ask, why are we modernizing? We are modernizing because we see that there are huge opportunities to improve the experience of the products that FSA offers to users, and there's no end date on that. We are not cataloging our technology and looking at an expiration date. We are looking to drive outcomes for the American public and create prioritization and our strategy around that. But FAFSA, I think you'll see if you go to any of our events, is often the first time a US adult has a deep experience with the American government. And we carry that relationship on with them often 10, 20, 30 years. So we want a technology environment that drives good outcomes for them. Lets them successfully complete a FAFSA, whether it's day 1 or day 365, however reliant the calendar year is for the FAFSA cycle. We want institutes of higher ed to have high availability, accurate, real time access to the information they need to help those students along. We want people who are entering repayment to know what their options are, and to always have a high quality experience. What we really want to know is, how do we drive a roadmap where modernization is not a project. It is a mindset around here for delivering better technology that gets the outcomes that we want for the American people.

Kaegy Pabulos: Thank you, Sierra. Appreciate the questions, Ron. Casey, back to you.

Ron Hodges: Thank you all very much for your responses. That was very helpful.

Casey Wade: Robert, it looks like we're back to you for another question.

Robert Antonucci: Thank you. As I'm looking through this, you have goals there, but I'm not sure what the larger objectives are. I've heard a couple, but I was just wondering if you could share the tangible larger objectives. When you talk about performance-based decrease number of loans in default, are there specific metrics you're going to be looking at as far as percentage of applications that are actually completed? Those type of things. What are the high-level objectives that you are trying to improve beyond just these reliability user experience?

Kaegy Pabulos: Davon?

Davon Tyler: Hey, Robert. It sounds like they're very business focused. Again, we do have business outcomes that we're trying to meet. These are about very focused on the technology goals that we have that integrate with those business priorities that I work with the business partners to support. I guess, to answer your question, from my standpoint, I want to enable services that enables us to support business at scale. So as the business decide that they want to deploy a new IDR, as Nate said, it doesn't become this huge massive project. It's just another thing that we do. We want to improve loan servicing, and the business has objective to make that experience more consistent for whatever reason. We want to be able to enable little services to the point where, again, it does not become a huge effort. That is something that we look at it. We see that as part of our journey, that's why we see a great response earlier. We want to bake this into the Federal Student Aid experience. So that way, as I'm working with the business partners at Federal Student Aid, we become very integral into what they want. But it does not become this huge thing where there's an internal process, it's going to take all this work, and additional resources and cost to make simple changes to the experience that it becomes something baked into our DNA, and it becomes very normalized. Again, those business objectives, we want to make sure that we create an environment that allows us to scale and support the business as they need new capabilities.

Kaegy Pabulos: I would just add to what Davon said, is that as an organization, we have our strategic priorities that do drive towards making sure that we increase application completion for those who are eligible for Federal Student Aid, as well as make sure that we increase successful repayment and prevent delinquency and default for our student loan borrowers. Those two will always be our north star when it comes to students and borrowers. And then for our partners, Sierra did highlight that. Our partners, in this case, schools, state agencies, scholarship organizations that are working through with students directly as they go through that Student Aid journey with us. And the priority for them is to make sure that they have high availability to be able to actually ingest the information from Federal Student Aid and then support FSA in delivering our mission. Casey, I think one more hand, right?

Casey Wade: We do. We have one more hand. This looks like we have Mannal up next. Mannal?

Mannal Bakhsh: Hi. Sorry, I'm trying to turn on my camera. Hi. Good afternoon. Sorry, good morning.

Kaegy Pabulos: Sorry. Do you mind introducing yourself, your company, and the question?

Mannal Bakhsh: Sure. Thanks, Kaegy. Mannal Bakhsh, Cyber Prose Technology, small business. As we've been reviewing the RFI, there have been a lot of questions as I've been speaking to different companies in the industry. One big question is, is it for large business or small business? We understand the RFI does say it's open to industry, large and small. My question is related to a bit of one and two, current challenges and the overall modernization strategy. FSA faces unique challenges as far as their Cloud environment. There's hybrid, multi Cloud, Cloud native architecture within FSA with multiple vendors. We understand you're looking for different ideas and proposing it to FSA, but is FSA looking to consolidate all of the infrastructure systems to perhaps one large business infrastructure provider, and then having smaller vendors for the applications? Just based off of the current architecture, it's obviously quite complex. There's a lot of different providers and vendors.

That's one question that we're running into and trying to make sure that we give the best solution.

Just looking for some feedback on that. Thank you.

Kaegy Pabulos: I think there's a technical question. And then at the very beginning, we had Elizabeth Walker, Calvin Mitchell, Head of Acquisitions, from our small business office. Let me first pivot to the technical question with Davon, Drew and Nate, and then afterwards, have that reassurance, reaffirmation from Elizabeth and Calvin..

Davon Tyler: I'm not going to dive too deep into acquisition, but I will say this is open to all. Based on the responses and feedback that we're going to, hopefully, receive from you all, we're going to use that to determine which work is going to be associated with large and small. Again, it will be an opportunity for all, and then we'll talk more about that when acquisition folks come up. To the other questions that you have, are we looking to, from a technology standpoint, associate work with one large and have small applications, we've not defined, all of that yet. Again, we look at responses.

We're open. So I don't want to come here and give you guys an assumption that we've already pigeonholed ourselves into an approach. We have not. We're going to look to what you provide to us.

We're going to listen. We're going to take that in, and then we're going to develop an acquisition strategy that takes that into account so that we can be successful. I'll be very clear, we're looking to consolidate stacks that we have. How the integrators will integrate with that, we'll figure out as we look into responses and feedback that we have today. As Calvin mentioned earlier, there's several acquisitions that we have. There's redundancy that we have inside of the environment. We try to spell some of that out within the RFI and the challenges that we do have. Again, we're looking to work with all, there will be opportunity. We'll look into what you provide to us to look how we can streamline, associate work with large business, associate work with small business to help us create a solution that's consistent to the experience that we're trying to provide to the public.

Kaegy Pabulos: Elizabeth?

Elizabeth Walker: I think that's a great question. And I think just to kind of echo and build off of what we've been saying this entire time is, this is the time to really hear what is your best approach. Calvin and I have conversations all the time of how can we look at things differently? How can we break up pieces of work? So I think we really want to see what is your capability and what are your best suggestions of the pieces of work you can do. So when you look at it, this is a pretty big RFI, and it has a lot of areas of expertise. So even if you think that you can provide the best expertise in only one of those areas, please still respond with that and how you would approach that one, because this is the time where we are going to look at what is capable and build that acquisition strategy off of that. So even if there's a niche area that you think that you can provide the best support and the most innovative support, I would still respond with that. But we are looking at what's the most efficient way we can buy this, but that might be breaking you up differently than we have in the past.

Calvin Mitchell: I would say this is exciting. The deputy [inaudible 00:51:36], also former small business director, we were meeting and talking about opportunities to open the aperture and to think differently. This is an honest discussion, and I think you should be really encouraged that there is full transparency, and to bring your best ideas. Because we understand that you and industry are where the good ideas are going to happen. You're at different agencies, providing different solutions, and you may be able to look at what we're doing here, maybe help us. We would encourage all and any opportunities to all different acquisition strategies that may come up. Now, it goes without saying, we still have to go through market research, we still have to make determinations based upon what our requirements are, but I wouldn't let that prevent you from giving us your honest opinion. Because I think one thing that's very clear, this administration is very open to looking at Federal Student Aid in a different way. And so why not capture that opportunity to lean forward and provide solutions that we may not have been thinking of. I would say, this is an honest attempt to change the trajectory of our modernization efforts. Thank you.

Kaegy Pabulos: Thank you. Thank you for those questions. I think we are now moving into our next section. The next five sections focus on the technology modernization goals that are in the request for information. So we'll go through them one by one. The first goal really is around streamlining and integrating data infrastructure. As you've heard in these conversations, part of the challenge with FSA right now is that our data is fragmented, that's contained across multiple systems. The goal of this modernization is, how do we create or how do we enable a unified data architecture that allows for us to have a single source of truth when it comes to our students, borrowers, and partners. So a lot of that feedback we are eagerly waiting for you to cocreate and implement with us. Let's open up questions around goal 1, around streamlining and integrating data infrastructure. Casey, back to you.

Casey Wade: No worries. I do have a hand up. Now, Brian, your hand was up earlier. Is it still good for topic number 3, here?

Brian Murphy: I hope so. I think it's pretty applicable across the board.

Casey Wade: Perfect.

Brian Murphy: I'm just trying to get a sense, is this a Microsoft-based service that is the current setup, or is it a hybrid of different services used in the past? I think it's useful in this question and the other questions, to see what you're doing now so that we can understand where we're coming from. And I apologize. I'm with Kroll Associates. I put us in the kind of non traditional government category, a large business. Thanks.

Kaegy Pabulos: Brian, thank you. So on that note, I do want to invite here Ryan, Drew, and Davon to answer that question. Drew?

Drew Wolf: I'll go ahead and jump in here. Brian trying to find the Mute button, as well. You asked if we were a Microsoft centric, no, we're not. We actually have quite a few different technologies inside of the environment. We have based on Oracle, we have based on other SAS products. So no, I'm not even going to say that we're a Microsoft centric capability at this point. Ryan?

Ryan Yaworski: No. I would generally agree with that. Yeah, sorry.

Kaegy Pabulos: Davon, anything else? Or panelists, anything you'd like to add to that?

Davon Tyler: From [inaudible 00:55:46] standpoint, we're using AWS. Again, we're not tied to one vendor, one product. To be very consistent, our intent here is to be open to industry. So if you have ideas, solutions, and that means us paving our entire technology stack to something else, we're open to that. Again, one claim we currently have today, but I don't want you to think of that as a limitation, because we're doing or we're stuck with. We're on Oracle, IBM, we're in AWS, that we're stuck there.

We want any and all ideas to help us build an FSA together. So, again, we're open.

Kaegy Pabulos: Thank you. Casey?

Casey Wade: Let's see here. Up next, I have Jubal.

Jubal Biggs: Hi. This is Jubal Biggs with T-Rex Solutions again. In the data infrastructure space, I'd be curious to know if you guys could name some of the systems you may be using now or leveraging now. I'd like to know, are you doing automated metadata tagging, leveraging systems like Informatica, Talent, anything like that? Also, do you leverage streaming data solutions currently?

Kaegy Pabulos: Good questions. Drew and Ryan, I'll lean on you first on…