How Can You Test Lending Ideas Without High Costs?

Many early-stage lenders hesitate to test new product ideas because of the perceived expense. That's a shame, because great testing doesn’t require massive fixed investments. It's often possible to get the feedback and data that you need without investing in infrastructure. If you're testing brand perception, for example, polished execution does matter, and you'll need to build some infrastructure to get that feedback. But when you're probing interest rates, risk response, or loan terms, the learning can often be decoupled from the final execution layer. It just requires temporarily accepting high variable costs.

Let’s say you're launching a new credit line product. Instead of building the full origination infrastructure and underwriting stack, you could test interest rate sensitivity by manually underwriting a handful of offers. Yes, this might cost more per unit in the short term, but you avoid investing in tech and operations before proving the concept.

This principle applies broadly: defer fixed costs until you validate that the idea works. Accept expensive plastics, manual work, or subscale marketing channels—if those costs are variable and give you meaningful learning.

We’ve seen this work for many lenders. In one case, a client simulated an onboarding process using spreadsheets, PDFs, and a phone line. It was clunky, but it helped them understand which applicants were interested, how much they'd borrow, and whether risk performance aligned with expectations, all without investing a dollar in infrastructure.

Operational and compliance complexity might seem like blockers, but even here, a workaround can be found. For example, offering the product as a “manual approval pilot” or restricting tests to internal staff allows you to test without triggering full regulatory review. (Of course, testing scrappily doesn’t mean testing recklessly. We advise clients to consult legal teams and document test parameters to manage compliance risk.)

The smartest companies embrace messy, high-variable-cost tests early on—and only commit fixed costs once the business case is proven.