Card Deposit Routing
Redesign an app to manage successful processing of card transactions via payment processors.
situation
Millions of transactions take place in a day using cards when players deposit money to play at a casino. Operators need to ensure successful transactions of these payments as rejected payments can lead to losing players. In order to optimize acceptance rates, fight fraud effectively and optimize processor costs, the operators map the cards to the right payment processor. I was tasked with redesigning an old card mapping application to an new and improved version. The old application was not fully optimized and needed a redesign. The task was to simplify a complicated application to route cards to the right payment processor to accomplish a successful transaction. Some new concepts were introduced in the new design to better manage the mappings. The new application is now live and task completion times have reduced.
TASK
My job was do redesign this app keeping the complexity of feature while still making it intuitive to use.
Action
what is card routing?
When a player makes a deposit, the transaction is processed via a payment processor. The operator specifies which card should be processed via which processor. This is keeping in mind acceptance rate of the processor and the cost involved for successful as well as rejected payments. An operator wants to minimize the rejection of cards at the processor and wants a tool to manage mappings easily and effectively.
OLD application issues
The old application was 10 years old and much in need of a revamp.
The learning curve was high as the process of mapping was inefficient with large number of steps. The users only knew of 2-3 different ways of doing the task not necessarily the most efficient ways. They were unaware of some features as it was too complicated to explore the application.
App was not designed to handle large amounts of data.
A card could belong in a BIN group based on the first 8 digits of the card. Grouping of cards on this basis did not offer the granularity needed and groups ended up being bulky. It also slowed the performance down.
In a situation where a card needed a preference over its group, a one on one card to processor mapping was the only resolution. This led of lots of such overriding mappings in the system.
Due to lack of an efficient way to track the mappings in the app, users found it easier to create duplicates that spend time cleaning up the system.
It was hard to delete items without understanding its impact as a result large number of mappings that were no longer needed continued to exist in the disabled state.
Redesign
In the new application, cards could be grouped in more number of ways and in smaller chunks. A new concept of card group was introduced to manage the sheer volume of cards much better. A card could belong to multiple card groups based on country and currency. A card could also belong to player groups that it's owner was part of.
Search for a card group and change its mappings
View alternate routes from a card to payment processor
The most challenging part was to show the relationships of cards, BINs, card groups, player groups and payment processors. A user could search for any of these entities and a visualization tool shows what other entities it is mapped to and existing route that it follows to the payment processor.
If an existing mapping did not yield great acceptance rate the user has the option to open the visualization tool to see the alternate routes to other payment processors ordered by acceptance rates and make a shift.
Result
The app was had positive feedback with successful adoption of the users to the new system. Users found the new app easier to use.
