Fast and flexible, not furious: how top card issuers win the race

The importance of time-to-market is well explained in numbers. Fast innovators are 18 times more disruptive, reports BCG, and getting new products to market quickly generates more sales from them – at least 30% of revenue. The good old Need for Speed game is played in many industries, including card issuance.

Card issuers’ need for speed exists on several levels, observes OpenWay, whose Way4 card management software is used by top banks, processors and fintechs around the world. Indeed, rapid product development remains a top priority. It delivers the best results when supported by instant digital interactions with customers, rapid migration, and accelerated new market entry.

Time-to-market accelerated with flexible product configuration

To be the fast innovators, OpenWay clients rely on our highly configurable, rule-driven Way4 platform. Instead of hard coding, they create new products using flexible parameters. This includes pricing, instalments, multi-currency accounting, credit limits, interest calculations, exceptions, fees and commissions, authentication validity periods, risk operations, workflows, and more. Approximately 95% of product features in Way4 are parameterizable, compared to the 30 to 40% offered in competing systems. This flexibility allows issuers to quickly innovate a common product for a new business model.

In Europe, Way4’s basket data analytics functionality help transform basic prepaid cards into a social aid instrument with flexible spending control. Our client Enfuce and French fintech Welcome Place are piloting Visa-branded cards for refugees. Transactions on these cards can be instantly declined by the issuer in certain locations (e.g. gaming) but accepted at approved merchants.

In the Dominican Republic, where low-income families were offered financial assistance in 2020, our client Banesco handled the issuing aspect, and it took them less than a month from the project idea to the actual distribution of over one million cards.

When our client National Bank of Oman offered a reloadable prepaid card for travelers, it quickly configured instant self-service onboarding, favorable FX rates, and customer-controlled daily limits.

Thanks to Way4’s flexibility, Equity Bank Kenya was the first in the world to enable interoperability between a payment card network and M-PESA, a leading digital wallet ecosystem.

The breakthrough impact of flexible product configuration on time-to-market is confirmed by National Bank of Greece:

24/7 fully online processing for impatient cardholders

Cardholders demand fast service, no matter how complex their request is. Even when an issuer is onboarding a new BNPL customer at checkout, issuing a BNPL card and calculating a repayment plan – Way4 has it completed in a matter of seconds. It can also fetch various data from external systems. To generate personalized offers, our client Nets, an issuing processor within Nexi Group, examines customers’ bank statements, bill payments, surveys, social media websites, ecommerce and mobile money transactions.

For multi-currency cards, Way4 routes the transaction to a specific currency account according to the rules pre-configured by the issuer. This can be an account opened in Way4 or in the integrated Core Banking System. This routing causes no delay for cardholders.

Technologically, such efficiency requires 24/7 online front-to-back reconciliation and accounting, and this is where the uniqueness of Way4's architecture lies. All data stored internally and in the integrated external systems is analyzed by Way4's online financial core. All due processing rules are immediately applied according to the optimal scenario.

After migrating its credit portfolio to Way4 in 2023, an Asian consumer finance brand JIVF (JACCS International Vietnam Finance Company) reported:

CMS migration or launch from scratch – how long?

Innovative projects often involve a significant time uncertainty. OpenWay addresses it with a unique approach that, according to Forbes, “can increase your chances of success when delivering complex digital transformation projects in fast-changing environments”.

This approach enabled the success of Timo digital bank. In just 4 months we helped them launch their infrastructure on AWS, with Way4 managing a fully digital card issuing and payment lifecycle and providing external systems with a full set of APIs.

Replacing a legacy system can be just as fast. In 4 months Tsesnabank migrated from BPC's SmartVista to our Way4 card management platform. The bank immediately noticed a positive impact on its operational efficiency:

In a more complex project, where Sathapana Bank needed to replace a fragmented infrastructure inherited from two financial institutions, the migration to Way4 took less than 6 months.

All issuers using Way4 have their need for speed met on multiple levels, but each has a list of unique requirements, and the list grows over time. Prior to a new project, we work closely with the client to create the solution blueprint, assemble the project team, agree on the MVP, detailed scope, and timeframe. The insights that OpenWay's experts bring to the table help a bank, processor or fintech take the most efficient path to card business acceleration.

This article was first published by The Paypers, the Netherlands-based independent source of news and insights for professionals in the global payment and ecommerce community.