Great Lakes Reviews

Great Lakes needs to fire whoever designed their app and website. They are about a decade behind the banks and other loan service agencies. I wish I could give this 0 stars. I paid off 26 grand in student loans 7 months after graduating. The hard part wasn’t earning the money. It was navigating their atrocious app and website.

Desktop site 405 error all the time.

App? "Your session has expired". Can't get anything done.

What up? It ain't like we can switch. Fix this crap we're paying top dollar for!

The system does not allow you to remove any bank accounts or update them it says that you have successfully removed them or updated them but there is no change. The customer service representatives are also unable to remove these saved bank accounts.

I’ve used the iOS mobile app to pay and keep up with my loans for almost 4 years. I’m the past month, GreatLakes has stopped working. I can’t log in. Every time I try to log in (or even open GreatLakes ) I get the message “We’re unable to connect to our servers. Please check your connection settings and try again.” I’ve deleted GreatLakes and reinstalled. I’ve restarted my device. I’ve tried everything! I hope you guys can update it to get it working again!

GreatLakes itself is fine, but they changed the color of the navigation icons on the bottom of the screen to dark blue on top of a dark grey background. This makes the navigation icons extremely hard to see and read. I imagine that this would be a major issue for colorblind people trying to use GreatLakes .

GreatLakes is terrible at reading any documents I submit, which was the purpose of downloading this. Also, I use my Loan to verify my account with the IRS website and it doesn’t show any account numbers on GreatLakes which is inconvenient.

GreatLakes is pretty useless. I can see my balances. That’s it. It does not display the interest rate that a loan was originally taken out with if your loan happens to be in a student loan interest freeze right now. It won’t even show when your next payment needs to be made or how much.

Please add an “associated domain” to GreatLakes , so that iOS can support password auto-fill apps like 1Password inside of your app. It

Also, I’d love to see a modern UI update, and a new design language that reflects the latest official iOS design language look-and-feel.

GreatLakes needs to include original balance, daily interest added and a graph to show the impact of regular payments on principal over time.

While I have no issues paying my loans through here, GreatLakes itself can be inconsistent because of the servers. I think Great Lakes should hire a team of people to prevent this from happening because I want to be able to view my loans without any issues.

I’m looking at the reviews and I’m seeing that once you make a payment it does not show up as pending?
I would like to see that once I make a payment it shows in the details of the loan that it is pending or processed.
App still needs work.

It’s not great. If you need to change a payment you can’t do it from GreatLakes .

GreatLakes is overall pretty nice. Easy to see your account balances and submit payments. BUT you can NOT edit payments or cancel future payments after submission, which is a bummer.

GreatLakes keeps me up to date on my loan as far as information and interest goes but I prefer to pay through my banks online Bill pay. These payments do not display under payment history in GreatLakes yet it notifies me that the payments have posted. I have to check the website to see them in the payment history.

While you can’t do everything you can do online, GreatLakes is simple and easy to use. Since me and my wife have more than one servicer, I can compare it to other apps. Some suggestions based on what I’ve liked in other apps would be to include “original balance” under loan details (I find this value encouraging during repayment) and “amount added per day” based on the interest rates (also encourages me when I see this number go down incrementally after each payment ).

This your informational; quick glance; make your payments; view payment history,app. But it is a MUST have app. Plus see your balance and payment breakdown for interest vs principal.

Great company and all to work with. Would love for GreatLakes to have built in calculators to see how paying more towards principal would help decrease life of loan. Also would love to see how to decrease years with increased payment as there is no option online to GreatLakes to do this l my online to decrease your payment by adding years to the loan.

GreatLakes has allowed me to stay in control of my student loans without having log into a website.

I’ve had GreatLakes since shortly after paying off my loans 4 years ago. I haven’t even needed to really get on the website because of it. It does all the things I need and it’s really easy to use :)

I was able to pay my loan with GreatLakes no need to go on my laptop

I am very great full for the loan and hope everyone else reach their dreams

Thanks you

I paid my student loan‘s on time on the day that it says that I’m supposed to pay my loan payment and GreatLakes is saying that I have not paid anything but is saying is processing on the day that my loan payment is due so I am not liking that is not counting my payment that I made on time and is saying that my payment is late and that I have a late payment for all three of my student loans But it shows that the pain is that I made our processing on the day that they are due so I’m not understanding that

You really need to work on keeping the scheduled payments process more up to date should be able to cancel a payment that was done accident you have no way to show you scheduled a payment with is in process to your own people I guess either since the payment was made & waiting to process and you robo caller steal keeps calling daily because it seems it doesn’t know the payment was made. After a payment has been made you should make it to where it doesn’t allow you to make another until it shows any & all scheduled payment.

I make sure every month I set up my payment for the due date, or a day prior to the due date, and EVERY month, despite GreatLakes saying that my payment is “pending” I get the big ugly red “OVERDUE” on my account. In fact, twice now I thought that maybe I had forgotten to pay it since it said it was late/overdue, and made another payment-therefore paying two payments in one month! I was NOT late either time- the faulty system doesn’t take the payment out of my checking on the specified due day!! Extremely frustrating for someone who pays their bills ON TIME.

Unless I’m just doing it incorrectly, it won’t let me select the amount I want to pay toward my accrued interest. It has me paying the full amount and that’s not at all what I want to do. I’m in school and didn’t think about the accruing interest while my payments were being deferred, so after realizing it, I have been going online and making manual payments to pay it down, an option that sadly, is not on GreatLakes. If that gets fixed please let me know as I do love GreatLakes option for payment, when it has the same options as the online version.

Basically the only thing you can do with GreatLakes is pay your bill. And that’s frustrating at best. GreatLakes isn’t very user friendly and I work with computers as well as tablets all day with my job so it’s not a problem with the operator. Also, there is a delay with payments from GreatLakes and with the actual website. Not sure what that’s about but at this point I prefer to just use the website versus GreatLakes . Good try though.

GreatLakes really needs to be modernized. It should be clear with your current payment schedule what your payoff date is, but neither the website nor GreatLakes list that. In addition, there should be a calculator to show how that term would change if you increase your payments or make an extra payment. There is no incentive here—it’s jut a crappy, bare minimum app that serves no other purpose than to glance at your balance.

GreatLakes requires a full login every single time you open it. It can remember your email address, but that's it. No touch/face ID implementation, not even a PIN feature to simplify the process.
Please develop something that can use modern security standards and save busy students the headache of having to remember/look up a password for a service most people probably only log into on a monthly basis at most.

Not a horrible experience. However, with some minor upgrades, GreatLakes could be so much better. Could we at least start with TouchID and an improved user interface? Sure some of the loans are from the turn of the century, but doesn’t mean your app has to look that way. Do better please!

GreatLakes excels in simplicity and does the task of allowing the user to see loans and make payments,fair enough. However, in the modern day field of bill paying apps, Touch ID functionality is a standard, and the developer should consider adding this feature as a start, minor tweaks can also be made to the GUI to enhance aesthetics.

I use to be able to see how payments were applied to each token in the history/payments tab... now all it shows is how much goes toward principal vs interest. I miss this feature.
Other than that I like how I can now see each individual account and the breakdowns.

Hey app developers, please give us the ability to see the loan break down via GreatLakes . I’m trying to pay off my unsubsidized loans specifically so the total loan amount isn’t of as much interest to me as the individual loan amounts. Currently I can’t access that information from GreatLakes so it makes it rather useless for my purposes. Otherwise it’s good though.

Very, very simple app. When setting your account up initially, GreatLakes makes it very simple to set up your monthly payments. The only complaint I would have is that it’s confusing when changing account details and there are few ways to “edit” details regarding monthly payments.

To explain further, I recently got a new account with my husband and thought I edited my payments to come out of my new account.. but apparently I set up a NEW auto payment in addition to the automatic payment I already had set up.. so it made automatic withdrawals from both my old and new account, one day after the other.

The contact page was helpful and I got assistance immediately when I called. I was told I would get the money back and staff was very understanding. I made sure that the more recent automatic payment I set up should be canceled, as well! I guess I wanted to share this because the refund period is also lengthy (so make sure you do it right the first one!). I completely understand things have to be reviewed before they return payments, but I’m almost $1000 ahead on my payments.. so it’s not like I’m trying to get out of them. Another bummer is that I might not be refunded the $400 for 30 days. Which can make it or break it for a recent graduated/newly married gal like me! I know I have the option to edit the details online too, so be aware that the online option will ensure a smooth transition if you have a new account to use for payments. Thanks!

It’s a simple app, I wish you could change contact info on there instead of having to go to the actual website. But that’s more of a suggestion than a complaint. I’ve never had any issues with GreatLakes and I’ve been using it for years.

GreatLakes is great however it would be amazing if you could pay with debit or credit. I dislike always happening to use checking account. I rather it just come out immediately, so I can go on about my business.

GreatLakes is great. I love that I can make small payments frequently and that I can always see the exact balance and how much interest I accrue GreatLakes helped me to pay off my student loans much faster than I would have without it.