There, she was on financial aid, and she found the forms confusing. So did her parents, according to an interview she gave to Diversity Woman magazine — including her father, Didier, who has worked on Wall Street for more than 35 years, with 11 years at Goldman Sachs and three at Merrill Lynch, according to his LinkedIn profile. Ms. Javice, her father and her mother, Natalie Rosin, did not respond to questions about how Ms. Javice had qualified for financial aid and the struggles to obtain it.
“The whole thing never made sense to me or my parents, who both have master’s degrees,” Ms. Javice told the publication. And according to an article in The Daily Pennsylvanian, the family’s appeals for more aid would take the entire semester to settle, repeatedly. (A Penn spokesman, Ron Ozio, said it would be “highly unusual” for appeals to take an entire semester and that they normally take four to six weeks.)
Ms. Javice has said she graduated from Wharton in three years while often taking five classes at once. The school would only confirm that she had a Bachelor of Science in economics with a major in finance and a second major in operations and information management. It does not comment on the financial aid status, if any, of students.
According to state legal filings, Ms. Javice incorporated her first company, TAPD, in 2013. There is no mention of it on her LinkedIn page, but she has spoken about this pre-Frank start-up some in the past.
In a now-deleted interview on Medium from 2020, she spoke of the attempt at TAPD to come up with a better way to judge the creditworthiness of people just getting started in life.
Credit scoring involves complex state and federal regulations, and after 18 months, Ms. Javice realized that building a new system and complying with the rules would be too expensive. “I fired all my employees,” she said in the Medium interview. “It was the worst thing I’ve ever had to do. A lot of my employees were close friends and still won’t talk with me to this day.”
From all of this struggle, another start-up was born. In 2016, a message appeared on frankfafsa.com promising “Maximum financial aid, guaranteed,” and adding: “If we don’t save you at least $1,000 of tuition, we’ll refund you. Go Premium for $10/month. Cancel anytime.” At the bottom was an invitation to join a wait list.