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Most early-stage lenders don’t have a pricing problem. They have a learning problem. Recently, I worked with a fintech lender that had built a surprisingly sophisticated pricing system: ~600+ pricing cells (term × loan amount × bureau score buckets x customer channel) ~20 distinct price points in one point increments Strong portfolio performance and risk adjusted returns On the surface, things “worked.” But underneath, there was a fundamental issue: They had never run a singl

A model that ranks applicants by risk is only half the job. At some point, you have to draw a line — and how you draw it matters as much as the model itself. Score cutoffs come up constantly in conversations with clients and prospects, and the questions around them are often underappreciated. Where should the line be? What's driving that decision? And once you've set it, when do you look at it again? This post walks through how we think about cutoffs: what they're actually do

When lenders want to expand access to credit without blowing up risk, secured products often look like the obvious answer. Add a deposit. Reduce losses. Open the funnel. Problem solved. In practice, secured and partially secured credit products solve one problem while quietly creating several others. The question isn’t whether they reduce risk — they do. The question is whether they actually create a durable credit business. That answer depends far more on adoption, usage, an

The honest answer — and the four factors that determine whether it takes 60 days or 8 months (or never!). The Question Every Lending Fintech Founder Eventually Asks You've validated the concept. The product roadmap is drafted. The pitch deck is sharp. And someone on your team (usually someone who's done this before) says: "We need to start talking to sponsor banks." The follow-up question comes immediately: "How long is that going to take?" The honest answer is: it depends. B

We've written a lot about specific aspects of credit modeling — how to choose features, what AUC actually measures, when to retrain. But we haven't spent much time on the bigger picture: if you've never done a custom model build before and you're considering one, what does the process actually look like? How long does it take? And where does it tend to go sideways? This post is for companies that have relied on off-the-shelf scores or externally developed policies and are now

When credit card portfolios underperform, most teams look in the same places. They examine approval rates. They scrutinize loss curves. They debate underwriting cutoffs and pricing. And if those metrics look reasonable, they often conclude the portfolio is fundamentally sound. In many cases, that conclusion is wrong. The real driver of credit card economics isn’t approval rates or even headline loss percentages. It’s utilization — how much of the approved line customers actua

It's one of the first questions we hear from fintech founders considering a credit card launch: "How long is this actually going to take?" (That, and “how much money will this take?”, but that’s for another blog post) The honest answer is: it depends. But that's not a cop-out — it's the most useful thing you can take into this decision. Because the timeline for launching a credit card program varies by a factor of two or more depending on the choices you make before you write

Ask a lender how they plan to use their new model, and you'll often get an answer about approval rates, cutoffs, or pricing tiers. What you hear less often — but should — is a clear explanation of what the model's raw output actually represents and what it doesn't. That gap matters. How you interpret a score shapes everything downstream: how you set cutoffs, how you price, and how you know when something has gone wrong. And these are questions worth working through before a m

Launching a credit card program can be an exciting adventure, but it’s also full of challenges that can be significant barriers to getting to launch. In this post, we break down the top three hardest aspects of launching a credit card program: raising equity capital, securing a debt facility, and signing a sponsor bank partner deal with economics that work for a new program. Getting your arms around these challenges can help you navigate the biggest complexities of building a