Portico Financial Aid Release Notes - August 2026

We've been busy. Here's what's new.

This is a big one. Portico's latest FA release gets our CORE software ready for the 2027–28 federal award year. It also marks another milestone in our Verification AI journey, and hands your teams new self-service tools that take work off their plate. Below is the plain-English tour of everything that's coming in this cycle: what it is, who it helps, and what it does. 

At a glance

2027–28 Award Year Readiness — CORE now reads the new federal ISIR format, including the restructured loan-history fields behind the new borrowing limits.

Verification AI — CORE now begins auto-clearing eligible, routine verification records so your team can focus on the cases that need judgment.

Self-Service ISIR Needed Cleanup — clear out thousands of stale document flags yourself, no engineering ticket required.

Under the Hood — real speed and stability gains you'll feel under heavy load.

Integrations — the Populi connection moves to Populi's current API.

Loan Adjustment Queue (COMING SOON) — zero-unit handling — CORE will catch "zeroed-out" students overnight and adjust their loans automatically.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

• CORE Ready for New 2027–28 ISIR
• Verification AI: Your new automated teammate
• Self-Service 'ISIR Needed' Cleanup
• Under The Hood: Stability & Infrastructure
  • Faster, steadier CORE under heavy load
  • Less waiting on the database
  • Smarter internal tooling for faster, more reliable delivery
• Populi integration moves to the current API
• Additional Improvements
• COMING SOON: Loan Adjustment Queue

Staying ahead of federal change: 2027–28 award year readiness

CORE Ready for New 2027–28 ISIR

Every year Washington reshapes the ISIR. This year's changes are some of the biggest in a while — and CORE is ready for them.

What It Is

The ISIR is the federal file that tells a school what a student and their family can contribute, and what a student has already borrowed. For 2027–28, the government changed the file's format substantially: fields were renumbered, timestamps were reformatted, a new ISIR version marker was added, brand-new tax and income fields were introduced, and the entire loan-history section was reorganized to support the new federal borrowing limits. We rebuilt CORE's ISIR engine to understand all of it.

Who It Benefits

Every institution, every financial aid officer, and every compliance team — the moment 2027–28 records start arriving, your staff can keep working without missing a beat.

What It Does

• Reads the new 2027–28 structure — renumbered fields, the new timestamp format, and the new ISIR version flag — and correctly routes records to the right award year.
• Captures the new financial fields (Foreign Tax Return, Combined Adjusted Gross Income, and Combined Income Tax Paid) for students, spouses, parents, and parent spouses/partners.
• Reorganizes NSLDS loan history by category — Undergraduate, Graduate, Professional, and Pre-OBBBA — and feeds those figures to the funding estimate engine so borrowing limits are respected and students aren't over-awarded.
• Surfaces the new FAA Fraud Override flag to aid officers, and applies the revised "Unaccompanied and Homeless" values.

Student ISIR detail view showing the new 2027–28 fields (e.g., the Combined AGI / Foreign Tax Return fields and the FAA Fraud Override flag).

Transaction Details

Non-Financial Information

Manual Tax info that now include Puerto Rico

Indication about graduation

In Plain Terms

Think of the ISIR as a form the government redesigned this year — new boxes, boxes in new places, and a new way of listing past loans. We taught CORE to read the redesigned form so nothing gets lost in translation. Prior-year (2026–27 and earlier) records keep working exactly as before.

Verification AI: Your new automated teammate

Now available for Managed Service teams, CORE can automatically identify and clear certain verification records.

Verification AI is available to internal Portico Managed Services teams. It will become directly available for external software users in the future.

What It Is

Verification is getting smarter. Our verification AI agent is now working eligible V1 records, including reviewing them and clearing documents without manual effort. CORE has begun automatically reviewing eligible, routine verification records — approving the worksheet and completing the record — so your team's time goes to the cases that actually need a human. This is the first step, and it will grow over time.

What It Does

Where every condition is met, the agent reviews the record, approves the verification worksheet, marks the documents and ISIR as cleared, and advances the record to Complete. This helps save manual effort. Anything that doesn't fully qualify is left untouched for your team to handle.

For now, automation acts only on V1 records that match one of these, with only the verification worksheet on file (no tax documents or other documents triggered):

• Independent student, household size 1, DDX/DRT 200
• Dependent student, household size 2, DDX/DRT 200

In Plain Terms

This new "AI teammate" can now handle the routine V1 clearances for us, write down everything it did, and stop and raise its hand the moment something doesn't look right. This helps people spend their time on the records that actually need judgment.

Less Busywork: New cleanup & automation tools

Self-Service 'ISIR Needed' Cleanup

Clear thousands of stale "ISIR Needed" flags yourself — right from Primary Configuration. No engineering ticket needed.

What It Is 

When we bring an institution onto CORE with years of historical data, the system can auto-create an "ISIR Needed" flag for old records from previous award years with no ISIR on file. On a large import that can mean thousands of non-actionable items flooding the document section. This new tool lets your team take care of that yourselves.

Who It Benefits

Implementation specialists and FA staff onboarding institutions with lots of history. No more filing a ticket and waiting on engineering to run a cleanup.

What It Does

From the Primary Configuration section of CORE, you set a "retain from" date and choose an action — Waive or Delete. Records dated on or after your date keep their flag; older ones get the action you chose. You can preview the impact first (it tells you how many records would be affected) before running anything. At scale, this can identify thousands of matching records and clean them in one pass.

The "Bulk document cleanup" panel in Primary Configuration → Document Trigger Related, showing the retain date, the Waive/Delete choice, and the Preview control.

In Plain Terms

A "soft delete" means CORE keeps a hidden record even after something is removed from view — nothing is truly gone. Waive keeps the record visible in the student document section but flips its status to WAIVED once 'Run Clean-up' completes. Delete removes it from the view. Even though the wording in the UI mentions the flag, the action suppresses the flag for past ISIR dates and still allows an ISIR to be requested beyond the date shown. In the example image, that date is 01/01/2020.

Please note that training will be coming soon. This is an ongoing initiative: greater visibility and change-tracking will be added over time so you can see and track exactly what was cleaned up.

Under The Hood: Stability & Infrastructure

Not every improvement is one you can see, but you'll feel these. In this cycle we invested in CORE's speed and steadiness under high usage, and in the tooling our own teams use to build and test.

Faster, steadier CORE under heavy load

CORE now keeps capacity ready for the first traffic spike instead of scrambling to catch up.

What It Does: When a lot of people hit CORE at the same time, the system used to take a moment to spin up extra capacity, which could make pages feel slow at the start of a busy period. We now reserve that capacity up front, so CORE stays responsive from the first spike.

Less waiting on the database

We relaxed an overly strict database setting so routine actions no longer block one another unnecessarily.

What It Does: Certain operations were using a stricter database locking mode than they needed, which could make actions wait on each other. We switched them to the appropriate level — the right data stays protected, but operations stop getting in each other's way.

Smarter internal tooling for faster, more reliable delivery

New AI tooling and documentation help our own engineers and QA build, test, and verify faster.

What It Does: Behind the scenes, we invested in stronger internal tooling and testing this cycle. You won't interact with it directly, but it's the durable groundwork that makes each release more thorough and more reliable for you.

Integrations

Populi integration moves to the current API

Our Populi connection for student package imports now runs on Populi's current API.

What It Does

Populi retired its legacy API, so we've moved our student package import integration onto their current one. For institutions using Populi, this keeps the connection supported, secure, and reliable going forward.

Additional Improvements

The latest release also includes improvements across several functional areas of the Financial Aid platform, including:

• Improved Pell processing reliability, including support for transfer-related award issues and repeated export failures.
• Improved rebuild-file processing to prevent files from remaining stuck in an “In Progress” status.
• Improved SMS delivery reliability for students completing e-signature paperwork.
• Improved credit-balance refund processing by resolving ledger transactions that could block refunds.
• Added a proposed enhancement to alert staff when repeated financial aid export failures occur.

Please reach out to our Support or Product teams with specific questions.

Loan Adjustment Queue 

For internal Portico teams, CORE now adjusts loans automatically for "zeroed-out" students and scheduled-unit changes. The client-facing version is COMING SOON!

When a school zeroes out a student's units, CORE now catches it overnight and adjusts the loan automatically — on your behalf, with nothing for your team to do. We have completed the internal "part 1" of this feature, and will complete the client version for your use soon.

What It Is

Some institutions don't withdraw or cancel a student at the term level. Instead, they zero out the student's scheduled units. Because the student's enrollment status doesn't change, these cases used to slip through and needed manual attention. CORE will handle them for you automatically.

Who It Benefits

Institutions that manage enrollment changes by zeroing units, and the CORE teams who support them — the system will do the legwork instead of a representative having to watch for it.

What It Does

An overnight job identifies any institution and student whose scheduled units have been zeroed out. It tags them in the Loan Adjustment Queue under the reason "Zero-Scheduled-Unit Removal," zeroes out the loan, and checks the zero-out box for the institution. This completes the whole thing on the system's behalf, with no manual attention required. Underneath, the queue also detects when a student's scheduled units change compared with the last loan calculation and recalculates the correct disbursement amount automatically.

The Loan Adjustment Queue showing a record tagged "Zero-Scheduled-Unit Removal," and/or the Student Disbursement Zero-Out Report where completed students appear.

Current view: (final version may vary slightly)

We'd love to hear from you and your colleagues about product feedback or what you'd like to see next.

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