It has now been a little over three years since Matt, Rich and I founded Clarity. As many of you already know, I didn’t set out to build a financial aid platform. The opportunity, as happenstance would have it, found me. About three months after selling my first company, PeerPal, I was at the EMA Conference in Seattle. At the conference, a bunch of admission directors told me about how cumbersome the financial aid process was and asked if I would consider building something new.

In the three years since those early conversations at EMA, a lot has happened:

• Over 1,000 schools have chosen to partner with us, and we continually strive to be good stewards of your trust!
• We have retrieved over 500,000 tax documents automatically from the IRS.
• Our Client Success Team has cumulatively hosted almost 10,000 meetings with our school partners.

That last stat is one of my favorites because it demonstrates our commitment to listening, which is one of the core values our company was built on. Clarity would not exist if we hadn’t been listening at EMA, after all. As Clarity grew and we continued to listen, we started hearing consistent requests to build more products, applying the same approach we had applied to the challenges of financial aid.

Naturally curious, Matt, Rich and I went back to the beginning: we listened. Over the course of a few months, we conducted hundreds of Zoom calls with admission and business office administrators, listening to their challenges and their ideas. Many of you may remember having a call like this with us.

We then launched a national Listening Tour (yes, we did actually call it that), visiting eight cities to hear from even more administrators while gathering feedback on some of our early ideas for new products.

On the other end of all our listening was... a spreadsheet. A big spreadsheet with hundreds of ideas of what Clarity could build next. As many ideas as there were, there were three areas where we got the most requests and where we felt we could deliver unique value to schools and families. They were:

• Enrollment contracts
• Tuition and incidental billing
• Admission / enrollment management

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Introducing Clarity Contracts and Billing

‍Today, we are excited to announce the official launch of the Clarity Contracts and Clarity Billing products. We spent much of the last 18 months building these new products in close partnership with schools who provided feedback on what they wanted us to build. For the past few months, a group of 50 pilot schools has used these new products to send out their enrollment and re-enrollment contracts, collect deposits, and have families sign up for payment plans and make payments.

While we continue to learn and improve the product every day, there have already been many 'wow' and 'aha' moments that remind me so much of the early days after launching Clarity Financial Aid. There is lots of work that remains to be done, but I am confident that we have built two products that will join Clarity Financial Aid in defining a new standard for the industry.

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Building the Future of Admission

‍When we decided to build Contracts and Billing, we certainly weren’t forgetting about admission. While we were intentional about not taking on too much at once, an admission platform seemed a likely possibility to be the next thing we build. In the last 18 months, we have received an overwhelming number of requests from our school partners to build a new admission platform.

And so today we are also excited to share that we will be building an admission platform and admission application. While we are still very early in the design process, our vision is clear:

1. To make discovering and applying to independent schools incredibly simple.

Families will be able to apply to your school for admission and financial aid in one streamlined, mobile-friendly application experience.

2. To build an admission system that feels like it was designed in 2025 for today's schools and families.

We're bringing the same innovative spirit and collaborative energy that we built Clarity Financial Aid, Contracts, and Billing with to continue providing schools with software that's actually built for the way they work.

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Join Us in the Next Phase of Our Journey

Finally, as Clarity continues to grow and support new products, I want to renew my commitment to you: the quality and innovation that you are accustomed to with Clarity Financial Aid will continue. If anything, it will only increase, as 2024 saw us significantly grow the Engineering, Product, and Client Success teams that are dedicated to building and supporting Clarity Financial Aid. I truly think we are only at the tip of the iceberg in terms of the innovation and value we can deliver to both you and your families when it comes to our financial aid product.

Thank you for your continued trust and partnership. As always, please feel free to reach out to me anytime. And if you are interested in sharing thoughts or ideas on what you would want to see in a new admission platform, please do not hesitate to connect. As is the Clarity way, we are ready to listen.