How to Validate Regulator and Customer Support Before a Major Market Move

Start by writing down what you are actually betting on

Before any external conversation, force the executive team to articulate the specific assumptions underpinning the move. Not the strategy deck version. The real ones: which regulator will tolerate what, which customer segments will switch and at what price, which competitor reactions you have priced in, and what timing you assume for approvals.

Most teams skip this step and go straight to outreach. The result is conversations that confirm whatever the team already believed. Write each assumption as a falsifiable statement: "The PRA will not require additional capital for this product structure," not "Regulators are supportive." If you cannot phrase it as something that could be proven wrong, it is not an assumption, it is a hope.

Rank the assumptions by two criteria: how much of the business case depends on them, and how confident you actually are. The top-right quadrant is your testing list. Usually it is three to five items.

Separate regulator testing from customer testing. They run on different clocks.

Regulator validation

The fastest credible route is rarely a formal pre-application meeting. Those take weeks to arrange and produce careful, hedged answers. Faster signal comes from three sources, run in parallel:

First, structured conversations with former senior staff from the relevant authority, ideally people who left in the last 18 months. They will tell you how the current leadership thinks, what is politically live, and which technical objections will actually bite. Pay for their time properly and brief them on specifics, not generalities.

Second, a discreet read across peer firms who have engaged the regulator on adjacent issues. Your head of regulatory affairs likely knows who to call. The question is not "what did they say to you," it is "what surprised you about their reaction."

Third, only once you have shaped your thinking, a senior-to-senior conversation with the supervisor. Go in with a specific proposition, not an exploratory chat. You learn far more from how they push back on something concrete than from open questions.

What goes wrong: teams treat the formal supervisory meeting as the test. By then, positions have hardened on both sides and you have lost the chance to adjust quietly.

Customer validation

Forget surveys and focus groups for B2B moves. You need conversations with the actual people who would sign the contract or move the mandate. Twelve to twenty interviews with named decision-makers will tell you more than any quantitative work.

The interviews should be done by someone senior enough that the customer takes the meeting and candid enough that they push back. A third party often gets more honest answers than your own relationship managers, who customers protect.

The questions that matter: what would have to be true for you to switch, what is your current provider getting wrong, who else in your organisation would need to approve this, and what is the worst version of this product you have seen. The last question surfaces objections people are too polite to volunteer.

Read the signals properly

The most common mistake is treating polite interest as validation. "Interesting, keep us posted" means no. Real signal looks like: customers introducing you to their procurement or risk function unprompted, regulators asking detailed implementation questions rather than principles questions, and former regulators telling you which specific clause of which handbook will be the problem.

Disconfirming signal is more valuable than confirming signal at this stage. If everyone is enthusiastic, you are talking to the wrong people or asking the wrong questions.

Decide what would change your mind, before you hear the answers

Before the validation work starts, the executive team should agree the specific findings that would cause them to delay, redesign, or kill the move. Write it down. Otherwise the inevitable mixed signals get interpreted through the lens of the existing plan, and nothing changes.

Good looks like: a two to four week sprint, three to five tested assumptions, a written summary of what you learned versus what you assumed, and a clear recommendation that includes the option of not proceeding.

The next decision

Look at your current plan. Identify the three assumptions whose failure would most damage the business case. If you cannot name the specific person whose view on each one you have actually tested in the last 90 days, you do not yet have a validated plan. You have a hypothesis. Decide this week who runs the validation sprint and what date the findings come back.