Card-first Spend Management

I led the design of Factorial's card-first expense management MVP. The product replaced an earlier, document-based approach where receipts lived in a folder and approvals lived in a spreadsheet.

Responsibilities ran end to end: customer development, sprint planning, full experience design, branding for the cards themselves, prototyping, design QA, and one-to-one quality from Figma to production.

Three patterns kept showing up in interviews and lost-deal reviews.

Low trust in card-based expenses. Many SMB customers preferred manual expense claims because that was the system they understood, even when it was slower.

Manual, time-consuming processes. Document upload, data entry, and receipt storage on every transaction.

Competitive gap. Spendesk, Pleo, and Payhawk had card-based automation. Without it, we lost annual conversations.

I ran a competitive audit against Pleo, Payhawk, OKTicket, Spendesk, Revolut Business, and Captio. We reviewed closed-lost deals and churn reasons against MRR, and we assessed card providers based on what the competitors trusted.

Scope was deliberately narrow. Physical cards for POS, virtual cards for online, nothing in wallets yet. Tokenization came later as its own project. The KYB step inside the external provider was the longest path, so the design was shaped to keep that step out of the activation funnel for as long as possible.

Diagrams and journeys mapped the end-to-end card lifecycle. Wireframes went straight into critique with sales, then prototype testing with HR admins.

A coherent MVP, shipped in one push.

Card branding. Physical and virtual cards aligned to the Factorial identity, designed against the issuer's print constraints.

Landing page. A blankslate inside the product that explained the card-first approach and surfaced the activation step.

Cards list. List view for managers (audit and oversight), grid view for employees (recognition).

Card detail. Card 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 configuration.

Monthly EUR transacted: EUR 163 to roughly EUR 294k in 18 months.

Committed MRR: EUR 1k to roughly EUR 79k in 18 months, with new Business and Enterprise plans at EUR 0,5 to EUR 1 per company seat.

The card product opened the path to a new product vertical, IT Management, that used the same primitives to control software access and subscriptions.

A receipt is a small surface that punches above its weight. Most of the trust in a spend product lives in those 200 pixels.

Doing both design and product on an MVP is brutal in months one and three, and clarifying in month two. The lack of a translation layer between research and shipping is the only way some small products get out of the building.

The right scope cut is the one your sales team agrees to. The MVP was the contract that let the rest of the product compound for the next two years.