Factorial Cards in Digital Wallets

I did design and delivery for getting Factorial cards into Apple Pay and Google Pay. The team had no product manager during the build, so I covered that too: deciding what to build, coordinating teams, checking quality, and signing off.

Adding a card to Apple Pay looks like a single toggle to the user. Underneath, it is six months of regulatory approvals, bank integration, and edge cases around PIN entry.

We were losing sales because of a missing feature. Research pointed to three things.

Using the card was too slow. Employees had to take a photo of every receipt and type in purchase details by hand, even for a two-euro coffee.

We were losing sales and customers over it. Competitors had phone payment and showed it in their presentations. We were one feature behind in conversations that took six months to recover from.

The feature comparison tables hurt us. Without phone payment on the list, the product looked older than it actually was.

We analyzed why people left, interviewed employees about paying with their phones at shops, studied competitors PLEO and Payhawk, and ran two rounds of usability testing.

Round one showed three problems. The Cards section was hard to find, adding a card to the phone took five taps, and without an introduction screen the whole feature felt like a hidden setting. Round two confirmed the fixes worked.

We rolled it out in four phases, all inside one quarter.

Contracts with Apple and Google. Card design matching the Factorial brand.

Card management in the mobile app. Active cards view, lock and unlock, spending limits visible next to the live balance.

Phone payment with in-app visibility. Add to Apple Pay or Google Pay in two taps. A small label on the card screen so the employee can tell at a glance if their card is on their phone.

Cards used with phone payments went from 7 to 390 a month in eleven months.

Customers stopped leaving because of the missing feature.

New pricing (EUR 8 to EUR 12/year per card) became reasonable. The product started covering its own costs.

Doing product management and design at the same time speeds everything up. The time between a question and an answer is the difference between launching in three months and launching in six.

Two taps less is not a small detail. It is the reason people start using the feature. Most of the growth from 7 to 390 came from those three deleted taps.

Regulators look at the screens. The flow you design is the flow the bank approves or rejects. Treat the regulator like your first user.