Employee Benefits MVP

Spanish tax law lets companies hand employees pre-tax money for meals and transport, but only on a closed-loop card with a code-verified merchant list. Most SMBs ignored the benefit because the existing providers were operationally hostile: paper vouchers, manual reconciliation, three months of lag between issue and tax write-back.

I led the design of a new model that hooked meals and transport into the Factorial card the employee already had in their wallet. The same plastic, two new rails.

Three pain points came back in every interview, regardless of company size.

Operational burden on HR. Vouchers and reimbursements were processed by hand, every month, on a spreadsheet.

Slow benefit for the employee. Reimbursements landed in payroll the month after the spend, which made the benefit invisible to the people it was for.

Compliance complexity. The merchant category code check that proves the spend qualifies for the tax exemption was manual. Every receipt was an audit risk.

We interviewed HR admins and employees across Spain, Portugal, and Italy. Spain and Portugal share most of the regulatory primitives. Italy diverged enough that we kept it out of the MVP and built a clear seam for later.

Working with engineering and compliance, we designed a BaaS integration on top of Stripe Issuing. The merchant category filtering, the spend limits, and the per-employee budget envelopes all lived on the issuer side, not on our application layer.

I prototyped the transaction surface around three obsessions: real-time clarity at the till, a humane explanation for declines, and a single ledger that HR could export the day after month-end. We ran usability tests with target HR teams and employees and shipped what survived.

A six-stage card lifecycle: Awareness inside the Benefits Hub, Conversion, Account and KYB setup, Card creation, Usage and Tracking, Payroll Export.

Cards auto-approve at eligible merchants. The employee taps and gets a transaction line they understand on the same day. HR sees a live spend graph, can adjust budgets in real time, and exports a payroll-ready file at month-end.

The hardest single screen was the decline reason. The wrong copy at the till is the moment that kills the benefit. We rewrote the standard issuer decline codes into one of four employee-facing reasons, each with a one-tap remediation.

HR ops workload down 40% in the first month of use.

Benefits adoption rate up 25% across the first quarter.

EUR 220k in additional revenue generated in the first five months, on a category that had been dead on the platform.

The MVP also became the platform we later used to launch four non-card categories. The Spending tab inherited from this project is the same one that absorbs Health Insurance, Childcare, Trainings, and Wellness today.

Decline reasons are a design problem, not a localisation one. Every rejection at a till is a chance to keep or kill trust in a financial product. The cheapest moment to fix it is the copy step.

Compliance is a velocity multiplier when you treat it as a design partner. Half of the speed we shipped at came from running flows past the compliance team during wireframing, not during legal review.

Card-first is not a product strategy, it is an activation strategy. The card is what makes the benefit visible. Whatever lives on the card is what gets adopted.