When we talk about building a card programme, we literally mean build. Because sitting underneath every payment card is a set of foundations - or what we call the fundamental building blocks.
Without these essential components a card programme wouldn’t function. It’s as simple as that. But what are they and how does an aspiring payment innovator bring them together to create a winning product?
As with any construction project, the materials will likely come from a range of suppliers.
The footings
It’s the same with card programmes. For instance one of the fundamental building blocks is the payment network, such as that operated by Mastercard or Visa. Depending on your level of expertise, there are a number of ways to source this particular block - but you can’t avoid it because this is the component that connects your ‘card’ to the wider financial system. (Be that in a physical, virtual or tokenised form.)
Next, there is the relevant regulatory licence. This will be applicable to the jurisdiction you’re operating in and the type of financial user journey you’re aiming to offer - for instance funds transfers or a full-scale banking proposition.
The third building block is the payment processor, which can be thought of as the engine that powers all transactions and much more. Today, modern processing platforms, like Marqeta, go beyond facilitating payments and provide a rich suite of functions that allow innovators to personalise and embed financial experiences.
Fourthly, we come to the card (fulfilment) bureau or provider. If you’re planning to offer a physical card (and it has to be said that you don’t have to these days, thanks to the rise of digital wallets), then you’ll need a supplier who will take care of the design, production and distribution of your card.
The site manager
Last but not least - and knitting the other four building blocks together - is programme management. A bit like a site manager on a construction project, they exist to ensure the essential tasks around regulation and payment network connections are fulfilled. And they should be doing this in a strategic way to optimise your product’s performance.
We talk about these in more detail in our Demystifying Cards guide here.
The build
With solid foundations laid, innovators can build with confidence. Or more appropriately, they can focus on commercial objectives and core business activities, which we talk about below.
Operating and growing your business
Two areas all innovators need to prioritise if they are to succeed are public awareness and customer onboarding.
This means devising marketing campaigns aimed at the right audience and then having a sign-up process with a sufficient amount of friction. It needs to be enough to prevent fraud but not too much that it leaves prospective customers abandoning applications in frustration.
Once you’ve got some customers, you’ll need systems and functions to handle the inevitable queries, complaints and payment disputes. Sure, there’s lots of conversational AI tech capable of dealing with many issues, but it’s vital to offer access to real people too. The level of access will be governed by your organisational capacity.
As well as serving customers, you’ll need to protect them against fraud. A payment processor will be able to provide advice about your responsibilities and the various actions needed to comply with relevant regulation.
Reassuringly, if you opt for a programme manager approach to building a card programme, they will be able hold your hand through all of the above and even take care of processes such as fraud prevention and customer onboarding.
It should also be possible to tailor programme management to cover certain tasks and functions in line with your organisational needs. The aim of the game is optimisation - the optimisation of building, testing, launching and iterating a world class payment product.
To find out more about what this looks like, talk to us. You can get in touch here.
