Card-first spend management

I designed Factorial's first expense card product. Before it, receipts lived in a folder and approvals lived in a spreadsheet.

I did the research, the planning, the design, the card branding, the prototyping, and the quality checks. Everything from the first sketch to the final screen.

Three things kept coming up in interviews and in reviews of lost sales.

Low trust in cards. A lot of small business customers preferred submitting expenses by hand because that was the system they knew, even if it was slower.

Too much manual work. Document upload, data entry, receipt storage on every single transaction.

Falling behind competitors. Spendesk, Pleo, and Payhawk already had card-based automation. Without it, we were losing yearly contracts.

I studied Pleo, Payhawk, OKTicket, Spendesk, Revolut Business, and Captio to understand what worked. We mapped lost sales and reasons people left against revenue, then picked a card provider based on who the competitors trusted.

We kept the scope tight on purpose. Physical cards for shops, virtual for online, no phone payments yet. That came later as its own project. Company verification through the card provider was the slowest step, so I designed everything to push it as late as possible.

We mapped the full card experience from signup to first transaction. Early designs went straight to the sales team for feedback, then to testing with HR managers.

One first version, launched in one push.

Card design. Physical and virtual cards matching Factorial's brand, designed within the card printer's constraints.

Welcome screen. An introduction inside the product explaining the card approach and showing the first step to get started.

Cards list. List view for managers (review and oversight), grid view for employees (quick access).

Card detail. Preview, balance, and controls on one screen.

Transactions. Real-time spend visibility per card.

Account details. IBAN, SWIFT, and bank info for top-ups.

Create card. Form for physical cards. Instant creation for virtual.

Card status. Freeze, unfreeze, cancel.

Spending limits. Per-card limit config.

Monthly spending through the cards went from EUR 163 to about EUR 294k in 18 months.

Monthly revenue went from EUR 1k to about EUR 79k in the same period, with new Business and Enterprise plans at 0.5 to 1 EUR per person.

The card product also opened the door to IT Management, a new area that reused the same building blocks to control software access and subscriptions.

A receipt is a small surface that does a lot of heavy lifting. Most of the trust in a spend product lives in those 200 pixels.

Doing design and product management at the same time on a first version is brutal in months one and three. Month two is where it clicks. When there is no translation layer between research and launching, some small products actually get out the door.

The right cut is the one your sales team agrees to. That first version was the agreement that let the rest of the product grow for the next two years.