E047 - Eliminating Friction in the Lending Funnel, with Rachael Olson, Former Head Of Product Strategy at Discover

Rachael Olson spent years running product strategy on Discover's $6 billion personal loan business, and she joins the show to walk through a real lender's application from marketplace click all the way to the hard pull, screen by screen. Using a hypothetical billion-dollar lender for round numbers, Rachael shows why the highest-leverage work isn't always at the top of the funnel. A 3% lift in soft-pull submit is worth $50M. Another 3% at hard-pull submit adds $80M. That's $130M+ of upside before anyone touches the credit box. The teardown gets specific. Forced email verification before any offer is shown. Rent-or-own and vehicle questions that the soft pull will answer anyway. A long pre-soft-pull confirmation page surfacing stale data the borrower doesn't remember entering, including education and net worth. After the offer, a wall of tooltips, footnotes, and filters that could induce decision paralysis. And the origination fee: a $16,900 loan that funds at $14,872, is disclosed towards the end of the process and came as a surprise. Carlos and Rachael also dig into why mobile starters finish on desktop, why "more data is always better" breaks down once you account for the customers you scare off, and how to actually A/B test your way through changes that touch credit, compliance, and engineering at once. ***** Want to meet Rachel and Carlos in New York? If you'd like to discuss eliminating friction in application funnels with your peers, The Free Toaster in hosting a private dinner in New York City on April 27th to facilitate that discussion. And we'll be there! Register for the event here: https://luma.com/733al355 ***** Find Rachel Olson on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/rachael-olson-7b13525/   Find Carlos Caro on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/the-carlos-caro/