What lenders actually look for in a loan lead
After seven years of selling leads to consumer lenders, the same five signals keep showing up at the top of every quality assessment.
We've sat in a lot of post-mortem meetings with lender ops teams. Different banks, different countries, different risk appetites — but the same five signals keep showing up when they grade lead sources.
1. Consent that survives audit
This is the one most networks get wrong. A timestamp isn't enough. Regulators want: timestamp, IP, user agent, language version of the form, the exact text of the consent paragraph, and whether it was opt-in or opt-out at the moment of capture.
If a lender ever has to defend a complaint with a regulator, they'll come back to your audit log. If your audit log can't reproduce the exact UX the applicant saw, the lender stops buying from you.
2. Validation that catches obvious garbage
Phone numbers that don't pass HLR. Emails that fail an SMTP probe. ID numbers in the wrong format for the country. IBANs with bad check digits. Addresses the postal service can't normalize.
Each of these is a 2-cent API call. Networks that don't run them are selling 5–10% garbage and wondering why their fund rate is mediocre. Run the checks at submit, before the lead leaves your system.
3. Dedup across the network
The same applicant submitting at three brokers in one day is — depending on intent — either a comparison shopper or someone shopping leads. Either way, lenders don't want to underwrite the same person three times. Run network-level deduplication and decide whether to pass the second instance through with a flag, or block it entirely.
4. Source-of-traffic transparency
Lenders want to know whether the lead came from organic search, paid social, an affiliate, or a comparison engine. Each behaves differently in underwriting. SEM clicks have different early-default rates than SEO visitors with high-intent search queries.
We send this metadata in our payload. Some networks consider it proprietary; that's silly — withholding it just makes lenders distrust the whole feed.
5. Honest accept/reject loop
Lenders should send accept/reject signals back to the network. Networks should use those signals to retrain the routing model, and they should publish how often they retrain. If you're routing on March's data in September, you don't deserve the volume.
If you're a lender currently buying leads from someone, ask them how they score on these five. If you're a broker, ask yourself the same. The gap between "we capture consent" and "our consent record survives audit" is where most of the remaining margin lives.