50 questions to ask loan management system vendors
A vendor-evaluation question bank covering 50 questions across 9 themes. Use during demos, vendor calls, or as the question track for your RFP response template.
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How to use this question bank
Each theme corresponds to a section of an enterprise LMS RFP. Pull the questions you need into your RFP document, or use the bank verbatim during vendor demos and follow-up calls.
01Product configuration
- Can the Loan Management System (LMS) configure multiple loan products without code changes?
- Can product rules vary by tenant, geography, partner, portfolio, or borrower segment?
- Does the platform support multiple currencies and repayment frequencies?
- How are charges, penalties, waivers, and allocation rules configured?
- Can product configuration changes be maker-checker approved and audited?
- Can product versions be scheduled, effective-dated, and retired without disrupting existing loans?
02Loan lifecycle
- What lifecycle states are supported out of the box?
- Can the system support partial and tranche-based disbursement?
- Can the system generate repayment schedules with moratorium and step-up / step-down?
- Can loans be restructured, refinanced, rescheduled, or written off?
- How are asset classifications configured and updated automatically?
- Can backdated corrections be processed with audit history and accounting impact preserved?
03Collections & delinquency
- Does the system calculate DPD automatically?
- Can DPD bands and delinquency buckets be configured per product or partner?
- Can collections queues be assigned by product, geography, risk, or delinquency stage?
- Does the system track promises-to-pay end-to-end?
- Are settlement approvals maker-checker controlled?
- Can queue priority combine DPD, risk score, promise-to-pay status, and collector capacity?
04Accounting & reconciliation
- Does the LMS maintain accounting events natively?
- Can GL mappings vary by product, charge, fee, tax, transaction, or branch?
- How are payment reversals handled across the GL?
- How are failed payments handled across the lifecycle?
- Can the system reconcile payment-gateway and bank transactions?
05Security & compliance
- Does the system support OIDC / OAuth2?
- Does it support role-based access control with permission groups?
- Does it support an org-unit hierarchy with tree operations?
- Are loan mutations captured with before / after audit?
- Is PII encrypted at field level with key versioning?
- Can access policies restrict data by tenant, org unit, role, and field sensitivity?
06Deployment
- Can the LMS run on-prem?
- Can it run in a lender-owned VPC?
- Can it run as a single-tenant cloud deployment?
- How does the platform handle data residency at the tenant level?
- How is tenant isolation enforced: application layer, database layer, or both?
07Integrations
- Does the platform expose OpenAPI specifications generated from controllers?
- How does API versioning work: header-based, URL-based, or content-negotiation?
- Can the LMS integrate with core banking systems as either system of record or satellite?
- Can it integrate with payment gateways, credit bureaus, and KYC providers?
- Can it integrate with enterprise accounting systems via standard connectors?
08AI loan servicing
- Can the AI agent answer loan-account-specific questions using canonical data?
- Can it explain overdue amount, charges, repayment schedule, and next due date?
- Can it summarise account history for servicing teams?
- Can human users approve AI-suggested actions before execution?
- Are AI prompts, responses, and actions logged in the audit trail?
09Implementation, migration & vendor governance
- What data migration approach does the vendor recommend, and what does parallel run look like?
- Can historical transactions, schedules, and balances be migrated and validated?
- What support model and SLAs are available: uptime, response time, escalation paths?
- How are risks documented in the RFP response, and what mitigations are proposed?
- What commercial model is offered: licensing, payment milestones, renewal terms?
- Does the vendor provide a cutover runbook with reconciliation gates and rollback criteria?
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Frequently asked questions
What buyers ask us about running this question bank in a live evaluation.
How many of these fifty questions should we actually send?
Send all fifty if you are running a formal RFP: vendors expect volume and answering is their job, not yours. If you are doing a lighter evaluation, send themes 01, 02 and 05 (architecture, configuration, security) and hold the rest for the demo. Those three separate vendors faster than the other six combined.
What does a good answer look like, versus an evasive one?
A good answer is specific and falsifiable: a named mechanism, a version, a limit, a trade-off the vendor is willing to state. An evasive answer restates the question as a capability ("yes, we support flexible configuration"). If the answer would be equally true of every vendor in your shortlist, it has told you nothing.
Should the demo come before or after these questions?
After. A demo shows a rehearsed path through the software and is designed to answer questions you have not thought to ask yet. Send the questions first, read the written answers, then use the demo to test the three answers you found least convincing. That inverts who is steering the hour.
Which questions matter most if we only have time for ten?
Take the ones where the answer is architectural and therefore expensive to change: tenant isolation, how the ledger handles arithmetic and rounding, what is written to the audit trail on a state change, how configuration is done without vendor code, and what happens when an integration is unavailable. Features can be added later. These cannot.
Do these questions work for a loan origination system as well?
Partly. Themes on architecture, security, integration and AI governance transfer directly. The lifecycle, collections and accounting themes are specific to servicing the book after approval, and an LOS will reasonably answer "not applicable" to them. Do not let a combined LOS and LMS pitch use that overlap to skip the servicing questions.
Is it fair to ask a vendor fifty questions?
It is more than fair: you are considering handing them the system of record for your loan book, and a vendor who finds fifty questions burdensome is telling you something useful about the support relationship. What is not fair is asking fifty questions and reading none of the answers. If you send them, budget the time to score them.