Olympic Student Loan Trust: What FM/OLYMPIC Means for Your Old Discover Loans

Olympic Student Loan Trust is the company that took over former Discover private student loans. When Discover left the student loan business in 2024, it sold its loans to investment funds managed by Carlyle and KKR. Firstmark Services collects the payments — which is why “FM/OLYMPIC” now appears on your credit report. It’s legitimate, your loan terms didn’t change, and if you can’t afford the payments, you have options.

Olympic Student Loan Trust is a Delaware trust created to hold the private student loans Discover sold when it exited student lending. Discover announced the sale in July 2024 — a portfolio of roughly $10 billion in private student loans went to investment vehicles managed by affiliates of Carlyle and KKR, two of the largest private equity firms in the world. The trust they set up to own the loans is Olympic Student Loan Trust.

• It’s an owner, not a lender. The trust didn’t make your loan and doesn’t deal with borrowers directly. It bought the debt in bulk, the way investors buy portfolios of mortgages or credit card accounts. A company called Monogram manages the portfolio, and Wilmington Trust serves as trustee.

• It holds Discover loans — including some older ones. The pool covers loans Discover originated itself, plus loans Discover took over years ago when it acquired Citibank’s Student Loan Corporation. If your loan started with Citibank or CitiAssist before Discover ever showed up on your statements, it likely rode along in the same sale.

• Firstmark Services is the servicer. Firstmark, a division of Nelnet, handles billing, payments, and customer service on the trust’s behalf. When you call about your loan, you’re talking to Firstmark, not Olympic.

• It’s not a scam. Borrowers who search for Olympic Student Loan Trust find almost nothing — no website, no phone number — and some assume the worst. The silence is normal — a holding trust has no consumer-facing operations; everything runs through the servicer. Contact information floating around online is another trap: at least one widely shared “Olympic” phone number belongs to an unrelated commercial lender in Washington State.

FM/OLYMPIC is the credit report label for a loan owned by Olympic Student Loan Trust and serviced by Firstmark. FM is Firstmark; Olympic is the owner. Seeing it doesn’t mean you took out a new loan or that your debt was sent to collections.

When the loans transferred, most borrowers saw two changes at once:

• The Discover tradeline closed with a $0 balance. That’s how a loan transfer is supposed to be reported. The account wasn’t paid off or charged off — it just moved.

• A new FM/OLYMPIC tradeline opened showing the current balance and payment history going forward.

The swap can nick your credit score temporarily because the new account is “younger” than the old one. That effect fades. The real risk is errors — a wrong balance, a wrong payment status, or a cosigner who was released years ago still showing on the account. Transfer errors happen, and you have the right to dispute them with the credit bureaus.

No — the sale changed who owns your loan, not what you agreed to. The promissory note you signed with Discover (or Citibank) still controls the interest rate, the repayment schedule, and the fine print.

• Fixed rates stayed fixed. A rate that looks higher than you remember usually means the loan is variable. Variable rates move with market indexes, and rates climbed sharply after many of these loans were made. That’s the loan doing what the note says — not Firstmark or Olympic raising your rate.

• Discover’s borrower benefits carried over. Interest rate reductions that were part of the loan terms continue for the life of the loan, and reward and auto-debit discount programs generally continued as well, with some exceptions. If a discount disappeared after the transfer, Firstmark can confirm whether your enrollment survived the system conversion.

• Your loans are still private. Firstmark’s parent company, Nelnet, also services federal student loans, and that confuses people. The transfer didn’t make these loans federal. No income-driven repayment, no federal forgiveness programs, no Department of Education involvement. If you’re not sure which of your loans are federal and which are private, here’s how to tell them apart.

Firstmark answers the phone, but the trust’s investors set the policy:

• Firstmark handles the day-to-day. Payments, statements, due dates, forbearance requests — all Firstmark. It follows servicing guidelines set for the portfolio.

• Olympic Student Loan Trust owns the debt. Decisions with real money attached — approving a settlement, writing off a balance — trace back to the portfolio’s owners, not the customer service rep you reach.

• The loans are being repackaged. Since 2025, chunks of the portfolio have been bundled into new investment trusts and sold to bond investors. That’s routine in the loan business and doesn’t change your terms, but it means the entity named on your paperwork can shift again over time.

A bank like Discover had some room to be flexible with a longtime customer. A securitized portfolio runs on policy — hardship options exist, but they’re narrower, and the person you reach has limited authority to bend rules.

Missed payments move these loans from delinquency toward default and charge-off within months — private loans don’t run on the slower federal timeline:

• Delinquency starts immediately. Late fees can apply, and the missed payments hit both your credit report and your cosigner’s once they’re reported.

• Default typically comes after several months of missed payments. Private lenders don’t have to wait the 270 days federal loans do. The note defines default, and 120 days of nonpayment is a common trigger.

• Charge-off follows. The loan gets written off as uncollectable on the owner’s books — but you still owe it. Collection activity continues, through collection agencies or, potentially, a lawsuit.

• Whether Olympic sues borrowers is an open question. As of mid-2026, public court records don’t show Olympic Student Loan Trust filing collection lawsuits. The portfolio is young — it only transferred in late 2024 — so the pattern hasn’t been written yet. If a lawsuit ever comes, what to do when you’re sued for a private student loan covers the process, and a suing loan holder has to prove it owns your loan and that you owe the balance claimed — the defenses in a private student loan lawsuit start there.

With older trusts like National Collegiate, missing paperwork became a famous weakness borrowers could sometimes exploit. That playbook doesn’t transfer well here. Olympic bought these loans in one clean bulk sale from Discover, long after the industry tightened its recordkeeping. Documentation challenges can still matter in individual cases — how chain of title works on student loans — but they’re a much weaker lever against this trust than the old headlines suggest.

Your realistic options are a hardship pause, a refinance, a negotiated settlement, or a bankruptcy discharge — and which one fits turns on your income, your credit, your cosigner, and how far behind you already are.

• Hardship options through Firstmark. Forbearance pauses payments in short stretches, with lifetime caps that vary by loan program — and interest keeps accruing the whole time. Borrowers report strict limits and rare exceptions. A pause with the terms in writing buys planning time; it doesn’t fix the underlying math. How forbearance limits work.

• Refinance — if your finances would impress a new lender. Refinancing pays off the Olympic loan and replaces it with a new one — ideally at a lower rate. It requires steady income, solid credit, and usually a completed degree. That’s the catch: the borrowers drowning at 12% or 13% variable rates often can’t qualify. If you can, here’s how refinancing works. If you can’t, the options below are the realistic ones.

• Settlement — with realistic expectations. Loan holders generally won’t discuss settling until a loan is in default or charged off, and settlement on this portfolio runs expensive. Offers commonly land between 75 and 90 percent of the balance — not the deep discounts borrowers hear about with older defaulted debt. The offers track documentation: they improve when you can prove genuine hardship. Deals typically require a lump sum or a payout over roughly 12 to 24 months. How private student loan settlement works.

• Bankruptcy can discharge private student loans. The “student loans survive bankruptcy” rule most people know is incomplete. Private student loans can be discharged by proving undue hardship in an adversary proceeding — a lawsuit inside the bankruptcy case — and some loans that exceeded school costs or funded non-qualified programs face even better arguments. Olympic has shown up as a defendant in these cases, and it defends them like the institutional party it is: document demands and often a request to take the borrower’s deposition. Cases have resolved by agreement rather than trial, and well-documented hardship is what moves them. A resolution here doesn’t always mean a lump sum, either — adversary-proceeding outcomes can restructure repayment over a much longer term, often 10 to 20 years and sometimes 25. Bankruptcy becomes the remaining lever when the settlement math fails — the lump sum is out of reach — or when the student loans sit on top of other debts you also can’t pay. How private student loan bankruptcy discharge works.

• Your cosigner is on the hook too. Every missed payment lands on their credit, and if the loan defaults, the trust can pursue them for the full balance. Cosigner release is still available on these loans, but qualifying is demanding — an on-time payment history and a credit check the primary borrower has to pass alone. How cosigner release works and what cosigners can do to protect themselves. A settlement or bankruptcy that resolves the debt for one person doesn’t automatically resolve it for the other — cosigner exposure is part of the math from the start.

• Can’t afford your private student loans? Your options when you’re behind

• What happens if you default on private student loans

• How to get rid of private student loans

• Firstmark student loans: forgiveness and repayment options

• Sued by Southwood Financial Trust? What it is and what to do