Ryan Yu

SoFi — Build Your Own Loan

Making consequence legible

What this proves: people hand a decision to software when the consequence is legible. That handoff is the whole game in agentic commerce - and legibility is what makes it safe to give.

 

The trust problem

The highest drop-off step in a $10B student loan refinancing funnel was a table of roughly sixty options. Every number was accurate. Nobody could evaluate it. A 17-year-old signing her first loan was being asked to commit to twelve years of payments from a screen that told her everything and taught her nothing, so she left.

The prototype

$120,000

$5,000$200,000

APR 6.40%

Monthly payment

$1,356

Total interest over the life of the loan

$42,777

Total cost$162,777

Principal$120,000

Interest$42,777

Every screen here went through legal and compliance review. The teaching copy was the hardest part to clear.

What happened

20% full-funnel conversion lift on a $10B book. Trust and conversion moved together. Showing people the true cost of the expensive option did not reduce borrowing. It increased completion, because people finish what they understand.

Why this matters for an agent

Before an agent commits someone to something they cannot easily reverse, the person has to see the consequence in terms they understand. Legibility is not a compliance checkbox. It is the thing that makes delegation possible at all.

The tradeoff accepted

The new flow shows one APR for one configuration, not the whole market. We traded the appearance of completeness for actual comprehension, and accepted that some people would want the table back. Almost none did.

Back to all three