Factorial Cards in Digital Wallets

I led design and delivery for getting Factorial-issued cards into Apple Pay and Google Pay. The team had no PM during the build, so I also held the PM role: scope, cross-team coordination, design QA, sign-off.

Tokenization is one of those projects where the surface area is a single toggle and the iceberg is six months of compliance, issuer integration, and edge-case PIN flows.

We were losing deals on a missing checkbox. Three things came back from research.

Friction in spending. Employees needed to take a manual photo of every receipt and add purchase details by hand, even for two-euro transactions.

Lost deals and churn. Competitors had wallet integration and used it in their sales decks. We were a feature behind in conversations that took six months to recover.

Sales gap. Without a wallet checkbox on the comparison sheet, the product looked older than it was.

We analysed churn cases, interviewed users about mobile POS payment, benchmarked PLEO and Payhawk, and ran two rounds of usability testing.

Round one surfaced three big issues. The Cards section was hard to find, the Add to Wallet flow took five taps, and the absence of a splash screen made the integration feel like a hidden setting. Round two validated the fixes.

A four-phase rollout that landed inside one quarter.

Contracts with payment platforms. Card art aligned to the Factorial identity.

Mobile app card management. Active cards view, freeze and unfreeze, spending limits visible alongside live balance.

Wallet integration with in-app visibility. Add to Wallet at two taps. A persistent indicator on the card detail screen so the employee can confirm at a glance whether their card is tokenized.

Unique tokenized cards used monthly: 7 to 390 in eleven months.

Churn from the missing-feature objection reversed.

New pricing tiers at EUR 8 to EUR 12 annually per card became defensible, and the product line started covering its own infrastructure cost.

Wearing the PM hat as a designer collapses the loop. The lag between a scope question and an answer is the difference between shipping a feature in a quarter and shipping it in six months.

A two-tap difference is not a usability detail, it is the entire activation funnel. Most of the growth from 7 to 390 lives between those three deleted taps.

Compliance reads pixels. The flow you draw is the flow the issuer approves, or does not. Treat the regulator like your first user.