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Payments & Card Networks
Payment Network Services
Regulated environments where trust, compliance, and operational resilience are non-negotiable.
Example organizations in this space:
Visa
Mastercard
American Express
The Clearing House
This interactive experience is the shipped product itself — the same application code customers run in production, mounted read-only in your browser over a real sample journey. Not a video, not a mockup: because the demo and the product are one codebase, it can never drift from the real thing.
Inside this journey
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Pre-Sales
Qualify and diagnose before investing in a full evaluation cycle.
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Qualification
Confirm budget window, decision authority, regulatory constraints, and timeline before investing in full discovery.
Qualification Questions
Regulatory and compliance constraints
- Which of these regulatory or compliance requirements apply to the integration you are considering?
- If any of the above apply, please briefly describe the requirement, affected markets, and the compliance owner
Budget and commercial readiness
- Do you have an allocated budget range for network integration and recurring fees?
- If helpful, note whether budget is approved, contingent on procurement, or needs executive approval
Decision authority and stakeholders
- Who will make the final decision on a new network relationship?
- Who else will materially influence the decision (select all that apply)?
Timeline and go-live drivers
- What target go-live window are you aiming for?
- What is the primary driver for that timing (for example regulatory deadline, contract expiry, product launch, or cost target)?
Next step preference
- If we confirm basic fit from these answers, would you like us to propose a short discovery meeting to align scope and acceptance criteria?
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Enterprise Discovery
Map stakeholders, transaction flows, security and regulatory constraints, and measurable success criteria across issuer, acquirer, and processor teams.
Discovery Questions
Getting started, in one sentence
- Tell me briefly about the card program or payment product you want to connect to the network
- Who in your organization will sponsor this initiative and who has final commercial sign-off
- What business outcome are you targeting in the first 12 months, please state a concrete metric (authorization rate, interchange uplift, active merchants, or revenue)
- How soon are you aiming to move from pilot to production, is that driven by a calendar event, a regulatory deadline, or internal roadmap
- If the project slips beyond your target window, what is the immediate business consequence to your roadmap or budget
Where the money and friction actually flow
- Which parts of your current authorization and settlement flow are costing you the most time or money today
- How many transactions do you process monthly, and what percent of those are cross-border or tokenized
- Walk me through a typical transaction path from cardholder interaction to settlement, and highlight where your team currently enacts routing, tokenization, or reconciliation
- Which fee lines or settlement variances created the most disputes or manual reconciliation work in the last six months
- What single settlement discrepancy or fee outcome would make your finance team decline to proceed
Who needs to be in the room and why
- Who outside the payments team could block or delay integration if not engaged early
- Name the internal teams that own the APIs, keys, and settlement files this integration will depend on
- Walk me through the last time a payments integration required new legal or procurement approval, how much schedule did that add
- If a key stakeholder refuses to participate, who on your side can escalate or override to keep timelines intact
- Identify the person who must sign for go-live and list the approvals or committees their signature requires
Regulatory and security pressure points
- What compliance gap in your current setup would cause a regulator to pause card issuance or processing
- Describe the certificates, attestations, or audits you will need completed before live processing (for example PCI report, SOC, local regulator sign-off)
- How many payment schemes or jurisdictions impose unique local rules that we must model for your flows
- Name the regulator or supervisory approval that, if delayed, would most likely block your project
- Is your team prepared to produce test evidence for PCI compliance and transaction-level encryption during the evaluation window
- What single compliance or security failure in testing would cause your executive team to halt rollout
Can you actually integrate on the timeline you expect
- How complete are the APIs, sandbox environments, and integration guides your team will hand to ours
- List the environments available for development, testing, and pre-production and name the owner for access to each
- Do you have anonymized test data that covers cross-border routing, card on file scenarios, and tokenized wallets for realistic end-to-end testing
- Provide the primary engineering contact for daily integration tasks and confirm whether they have dedicated time allocated
- Estimate the lead time to provision a missing API or access in your environment and indicate whether that fits your target window
- Identify any single missing dependency that would prevent you from meeting the go-live date
When things break, how fast do you expect answers
- Quantify the customer, revenue, or compliance impact of a one hour authorization outage during a typical peak period
- Provide the operations lead name and outline the escalation chain that reaches executive leadership
- How quickly does your team detect and resolve routing or reconciliation errors today and which tools measure that time
- List the monitoring tools, alert channels, and runbook elements our teams must integrate to meet your detection and resolution targets
- Would you pause live processing if monitoring cannot validate transaction integrity within five minutes
Other paths you are considering
- Among the options you are weighing, identify the incumbent vendor or internal solution you are most inclined to keep and explain why
- Tell me the competitors or alternative solution types you have evaluated and which are already live in your environment today
- What would have to change about your current provider or approach for you to decide to stay with them instead of switching
- Has anyone on your team proposed solving this entirely internally instead of partnering with an external network
- Assuming parity on performance and lower settlement variance, identify the remaining internal objections that would block procurement
Concrete acceptance criteria and next steps
- What measurable pilot outcomes would make your payments team sign commercial terms within seven days
- Specify the KPIs, thresholds, and sample volumes you will use to accept the integration during the evaluation period
- State the full title and role of the person with final sign-off for acceptance and explain how that authority is documented
- How will you model acceptance testing for sample volumes and who will run reconciliation at cutover
- Assuming the pilot proves the agreed metric, what would still prevent you from signing that week
- Describe the support and governance model you will require for the first 90 days of live processing
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Solution Evaluation
Prove interoperability, performance, and security controls against the buyer's acceptance criteria using realistic transaction scenarios and integration tests.
- current_state
- desired_state
- success_criteria
- gaps
- stakeholders
- decision_readiness
- current_state
- success_criteria
- gaps
- desired_state
- stakeholders
- decision_readiness
- stakeholders
- gaps
- decision_readiness
- current_state
- decision_readiness
- decision_readiness
- decision_readiness
- decision_readiness
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Solution Scope
Define integration boundaries, modules (tokenization, fraud, routing, clearing), responsibilities, service levels, and measurable acceptance criteria.
Scope Configuration
- Provision Real-Time Authorization Switching
- Execute Clearing and Settlement Processing
- Provide Cross-Border Multi-Currency Settlement
- Activate Network Tokenization and Lifecycle
- Deploy Fraud Prevention and Risk Scoring Engine
- Operate Loyalty and Rewards Processing
- Deliver Issuer Portfolio Analytics
- Enable Digital Card Issuance and Provisioning
- Enable Contactless and Mobile Payments Acceptance
- Deliver Acceptance Optimization Services
- Operate Dispute and Chargeback Resolution
- Provide Transaction Data APIs and Reporting
Scope Questions
Provision Real-Time Authorization Switching
- Does your current authorization path support ISO 8583, ISO 20022, or a proprietary message map for authorization requests and responses?
- Which peak transactions-per-second (TPS) must the realtime switch sustain during peak hour and peak day?
- List your required authorization response time target expressed as P50/P95 (milliseconds) for live processing and any allowable retry windows.
- Provide the detailed transaction mix by product and channel needed for routing rules (example: credit POS, debit e‑commerce, tokenized mobile, card‑on‑file).
- Confirm the specific ISO field mappings and decision codes you require (for example DE2 PAN handling, DE3 processing code mapping, brand response codes) for switch certification.
- What acceptance criteria will validate the authorization switching integration (for example: P95 latency ≤150 ms, zero message loss during 24h soak, successful ISO 8583/20022 field mapping test cases)?
Execute Clearing and Settlement Processing
- Which settlement file format do you require for interbank clearing and reconciliation (for example ISO 20022 camt.053, BAI, fixed CSV layout)?
- Do you have mandated intraday cutoff times or multiple settlement cut schedules that the clearing engine must enforce? Provide times in UTC.
- Specify the reconciliation reports and matching tolerances you require (for example: batch match tolerance in cents or percentage, unmatched item aging thresholds).
- Are FX netting or gross settlement flows required by your treasury (regional netting, per-country gross settlement, or hybrid)?
- List settlement balances and ledger accounts that must appear on the daily settlement file and the expected CSV/ISO field names for each.
- How will you verify settlement accuracy at go-live (for example: zero unreconciled items older than 24 hours, EOD balance match within 0.01%)?
Provide Cross-Border Multi-Currency Settlement
- Identify the correspondent banking, nostro/vostro or FX liquidity arrangements you currently use for cross-border settlement.
- Indicate the required finality target for FX conversion and cross-border settlement (for example same‑day, T+1, T+2) and any region-specific constraints.
- Describe the exchange rate sourcing and reporting requirements you need (feed provider, timestamp, rate margin and archival of rate evidence).
- Do you require multi-currency netting across regions or per-country settlement files for regulatory reporting?
- Provide the list of currencies and country pairs that have regulatory or reserve restrictions that must be enforced in settlement flows.
- Who will own FX liquidity shortfalls, intraday funding alerts, and settlement exceptions post-cutover?
Activate Network Tokenization and Lifecycle
- Do you require EMVCo network token services for card‑on‑file and wallet provisioning, including token requestor integration?
- Which token lifecycle events must be supported and surfaced via APIs (provision, rebind, suspend, resume, replace, delete)?
- Provide your required token-to-PAN domain mapping and BIN controls (for example BIN ranges excluded from tokenization, truncation rules).
- List the provisioning integration endpoints you will use (for example wallet provisioning callback URL, CMS endpoint) and the authentication method required.
- What acceptance evidence will confirm tokenization readiness (for example successful end‑to‑end wallet provisioning with tokenized PAN and cryptogram validation across three brands, complete lifecycle event logs)?
- Specify the expected PCI DSS scope treatment for token storage and vaulting (for example PCI DSS Level 1 scope retained, token vault out of scope, or need for assessment).
Deploy Fraud Prevention and Risk Scoring Engine
- Describe the fraud rule types and score thresholds you currently use (for example velocity checks, BIN blocklist, device fingerprint score cutoff).
- Which external and internal data feeds must the engine consume in real time (transaction history, device fingerprint, issuer chargeback history, 3DS authentication results)?
- Do you require hard declines at authorization, soft declines with 3DS step-up, or advisory scoring only?
- Provide target operational thresholds for fraud detection such as allowed false positive rate and minimum fraud capture rate.
- Are there regulatory exceptions to encode in decisioning (for example PSD2 SCA exemptions, local AML thresholds, sanctioned country lists)?
- Who will own ongoing model tuning and threshold changes after go‑live (your fraud team, our managed service, or a shared approach)?
Operate Loyalty and Rewards Processing
- Which loyalty program models must be supported (points accrual, cashback, tiered status, merchant-funded offers)?
- Provide the accrual and redemption rule examples you require, including merchant-funded promotions, deferred liability treatment, and expiry rules.
- Do redemptions require realtime authorization checks against loyalty balances at the POS or online checkout?
- List the reports you need for loyalty liabilities, redemptions, and reconciliation (for example monthly liability ledger, merchant settlement report).
- Are co‑brand or third‑party loyalty partners involved who require API connectivity or separate settlement?
- Specify tax and accounting recognition rules that must be applied to rewards liability and redemptions.
Deliver Issuer Portfolio Analytics
- Which portfolio KPIs must appear on dashboards (authorization approval rate, interchange revenue breakdown, fraud rate, chargeback rate)?
- Do you require cohort analysis by BIN, product, merchant category code (MCC), or channel for performance benchmarking?
- Provide required data latency for analytics (for example near‑real‑time stream, hourly batch, daily snapshot).
- Describe export formats and integration points you need for analytics extracts (for example CSV, Parquet, S3 export, API stream).
- Who will own consented PII mapping and token-to-PAN joins for analytics use (your team, our team, or shared responsibility)?
Enable Digital Card Issuance and Provisioning
- Do you require instant virtual PAN issuance, physical plastic fulfillment, or both as part of card issuance?
- Provide the BIN range or program identifier to be used for new issuance and any BIN-level controls required.
- Which provisioning channels must be supported for issuance (mobile wallet provisioning, in-app provisioning, card-on-file token provisioning)?
- List required KYC and identity verification steps and acceptable document types for instant issuance workflows.
- Are offline activation flows or OTP-based activation at POS required for newly issued cards?
Enable Contactless and Mobile Payments Acceptance
- Which EMV contactless kernel level and terminal certification must your merchants support for acceptance?
- Provide the expected share of contactless transactions at POS today and projected growth for the next 12 months.
- Do you require remote terminal provisioning and remote key injection (RKI) support for merchant terminals?
- Specify offline approval rules and floor limits per MCC or merchant group that your acceptance flow must implement.
- Are contactless transit or closed-loop acceptance use cases included that require special offline reconciliation and settlement windows?
Deliver Acceptance Optimization Services
- Identify the merchant segments, MCCs, or geographic corridors where you want acceptance optimization applied.
- Do you prefer routing rules that prioritize lowest acquiring FX cost, highest authorization probability, or a balanced revenue/approval optimization?
- Provide your current interchange leakage metrics and the target percentage improvement you expect from optimization.
- Are alternative routing endpoints available from your acquirers (host-to-host, gateway, third-party aggregator) and which connection types are preferred?
- Specify A/B testing windows and the success metrics you will use to accept optimization changes (for example approval lift, revenue per transaction).
Operate Dispute and Chargeback Resolution
- Which chargeback and reason code schemes must you support (card brand reason codes plus any local bank codes)?
- Provide your expected monthly dispute volume and the current average lifecycle in days for a dispute to resolution.
- Do you require automated representment workflows with evidence bundling (PDF, transaction log, signed receipts)?
- Specify SLA targets for dispute acknowledgement, investigation time, and closure that must be met post‑deployment (for example acknowledge within 3 business days).
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Mutual Commit
Finalize commercial terms, SLAs, compliance obligations, and governance required for network participation.
Agreement Modules
- Network Participation Agreement
- Commercial Order Form
- Service Level Agreement (SLA)
- Data Processing Agreement (DPA)
- Compliance Addendum (Regulatory & Industry Requirements)
- Security & Audit Addendum
- Clearing and Settlement Terms
- Governance and Steering Committee Charter
- Implementation Statement of Work (SOW)
- Onboarding Acceptance Certificate
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Deployment
Operationalize rollout with readiness checks, execution, and outcome validation.
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Pre-Deployment Readiness
Capture concrete readiness facts — environments, access, participant mappings, and cutover windows the deployment depends on.
Pre-Deployment Questions
Environment and site access
- Which environments are provisioned and accessible to the deployment team? (select all that apply)
- Production environment access status for the deployment team (select one) — we need this to schedule credential handoffs and the cutover window
- If access is pending or requires vendor support, provide the expected date or the support owner (name and role) so we can lock the cutover timeline
Data and configuration
- Which configuration or mapping artifacts must be finalized prior to deployment? (select all that apply)
- Who is the authoritative owner for configuration and data mapping (name, role, and contact) — this owner will approve final configs
- Are any regulatory approvals or data residency sign-offs required before configuration changes or migration? (pick one)
People and ownership
- Provide the named owners (name and role) for each deployment workstream: integration lead, security/compliance lead, operations/monitoring lead, and commercial/governance lead
- Are test participants provisioned for end-to-end validation (test account, test merchant, test issuer)?
- If some or none are provisioned, list which test participants or roles still need provisioning (short list of participants per environment)
Timing and constraints
- Are there blackout windows, regulatory reporting periods, or other calendar constraints that would prevent cutover on certain dates? (select one)
- Primary cutover target (date or target week) and any approved alternate windows (enter 'TBD' if not set) — this is used to sequence testing and outages
- Final readiness check: is there an agreed rollback / backout owner and documented rollback trigger criteria for the cutover? (this must be confirmed before deployment)
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Configuration Details
Record exact configuration values the deployment team will use — API endpoints, certificates, routing rules, settlement parameters, and threshold settings.
Configuration Details
Environments & Endpoints
- Enter the production API base URL for the integration endpoint (format: https://..., the Deployment step will consume this exact value).
- Select the primary deployment region for production (used by the Deployment step to choose regional stack).
Authentication & Certificates
- Select the authentication method the integration endpoint supports (Deployment will configure the selected flow). Do not paste secrets here — only the identifier is requested elsewhere.
- If using mTLS, enter the certificate alias or subject name as it should be installed on the platform side; otherwise enter 'N/A'. Do not paste private keys.
Secrets Exchange
- Enter the name of the secrets manager that will be used to exchange private credentials with the platform (enter 'platform-managed vault' or 'your secrets manager' or exact name). The secret value itself is exchanged out-of-band during kickoff.
Routing & Transaction Rules
- Enter the BIN range or scheme code this integration will handle (single value — format examples: '400000-499999' or 'SCHEME-XYZ'). Deployment will install this routing rule verbatim.
- Select the routing behavior the platform should apply for transactions that match no explicit BIN rule (Deployment will use this to configure default route).
- If you selected 'Fallback to buyer-specified acquirer' above, enter the buyer acquirer ID the platform should route to (enter 'N/A' otherwise). This exact ID is used in routing tables.
Settlement & Clearing Parameters
- Enter the settlement currency ISO code for this integration (3-letter ISO, Default: USD). Deployment will apply this to clearing files.
- Enter the settlement cut-off time in UTC for batch settlement (Default: 23:00). Format HH:MM (24h).
Limits & Cutover
- Single-transaction authorization amount limit (minor units, e.g., cents). Default: 100000 (i.e., $1,000.00). Deployment will configure this as the platform limit.
- Rollback window to use during cutover in minutes (Default: 60). Deployment will enforce this window for automated rollback procedures.
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Deployment
Execute integration, end-to-end testing, monitoring setup, and cutover with clear owners, sequencing, and rollback plans.
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Go-Live Validation
Verify transaction flow, settlement accuracy, fee application, security attestations, and stakeholder sign-offs before enabling live processing.
Checklist items
- Obtain documented go-live authorization from designated approvers
- Execute end-to-end transaction test plan and deliver signed test report
- Validate settlement reconciliation for a complete test cycle
- Confirm fee and FX calculation accuracy against contracted rules
- Verify participant mappings and production configuration values
- Confirm cryptographic credentials and certificate validity in production
- Obtain security and compliance attestations required for live processing
- Validate monitoring, alerting, and on-call escalation for live operations
- Confirm settlement banking connectivity and complete a live settlement test
- Document and validate rollback plan and create rollback checkpoint
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Success
Confirm outcomes, measure authorization performance and uptime, and maintain a shared channel for issues and enhancement requests.
Success Reviews
- Go-Live Health Check (weeks 1-4)
- First Measurement Review (weeks 4-10)
- Acceptance Gate, Outcome Ratification (around day 90)
- Quarterly Operational Review
- Annual Performance and Reliability Review
Issues & Enhancements
- Publish the quarterly performance summary and open incident register.
- Agree resolution timelines for any failed or conditional acceptance items and confirm how success will be re-verified.
- Publish the acceptance decision document including the named signatory and per-criterion outcomes.
- Create remediation action items with closed-loop verification steps and target completion dates.
- Record where the acceptance artifacts are stored and how they will be accessed for future audits.
- Performance against targets
- Confirm whether authorization success rate and network uptime percentage meet operational targets recorded in Solution Scope or require action.
- Reduce the count of open high-severity incidents and agree timelines for unresolved problems.
- Maintain a single shared channel for issues and enhancement requests and confirm the prioritization approach for the backlog.
- Re-confirm success criteria and owners
- Prioritize the top five enhancement requests that affect operational reliability and publish expected delivery windows.
- Update escalation contact list and confirm the shared channel notification rules.
- Year-to-date performance trends
- Confirm whether annual outcomes for authorization success rate, average authorization latency, and network uptime percentage meet the targets recorded in Solution Scope or document variance and remediation plans.
- Close long-standing operational blockers or document a clear multi-quarter plan to resolve them.
- Agree on the annual operational improvement projects and the criteria for measuring their success.
- Publish the annual performance report including incident retrospectives and remediation status.
- Create project charters for agreed operational improvements with timelines and verification criteria.
- Confirm ongoing operations cadence and the shared channel governance for the coming year.
- Confirm the deployment completed to the checklist and that key integration endpoints are live.
- Produce a prioritized list of open incidents and configuration issues with owners and target resolution windows.
- Agree immediate mitigations to keep live traffic stable until the first measurement review.
- Publish the deployment validation log and access inventory for async review.
- Create remediation tickets for each open blocker with expected resolution dates.
- Enable the shared issue channel and confirm notification recipients for P1 incidents.
- Present first-interval performance data
- Determine whether authorization success rate and average authorization latency are trending toward the targets recorded in Solution Scope.
- Document a prioritized remediation plan with completion dates to address any failed or marginal metrics before the acceptance gate.
- Confirm the artifacts and data that will be presented at the acceptance gate meeting.
- Publish the measurement dashboard export and share the raw data slices used in the analysis.
- Open technical remediation tickets with target completion dates and required validation steps.
- Schedule any required technical detailed review sessions to resolve persistent root causes before the acceptance gate.
- Restate acceptance criteria and numeric targets
- Produce a documented pass or fail result for each acceptance criterion recorded in Solution Scope.
- Capture the named signatory and date for the formal acceptance decision.
- Deployment and migration validation
- Diagnose root causes for gaps
- Major incidents and remediations
- Present outcome data against each criterion
- Incident and problem review
- Document pass or fail per criterion
- Operational improvement plan
- Agree corrective actions and timelines
- Enhancement request backlog
- Early adoption signals and usage patterns
- Formal acceptance decision and signatory capture
- Blockers and incident triage
- Shared channel health and enhancement backlog closure
- Confirm readiness checklist for acceptance gate
- Shared channel and escalation paths
- Agree immediate remediation actions
- Short action review and next steps
- Agree remediation plan for any failed criteria