VISA Commercial
How might we help accounts payable streamline purchase orders and transactions while regulating corporate spending?
visa purchasing card
Business Objective: Visa is best known for its consumer credit cards, but the Visa Commercial platform has a business equivalent: Visa Purchasing cards for enterprise customers. The web application for this service was fragmented and inaccessible to its target customers.
My Role: Working together with the Head of Product and Product Managers, I redesigned the web app to make it much faster and more accessible to its target customers.
Results: Reduced time to transaction data deployment from 2 weeks to 8 hours. Increased volume of business transactions on Visa Commercial Platform by 25%. Increased customer engagement by 30%.
STAKEHOLDER COLLABORATION
To get the redesign off the ground we decided to focus on the partnerships with Amazon Business and Bank of America.
Visa wanted to increase the size and number of transactions going through the Visa Commercial network. They had just signed a deal with Amazon Business, which offered a good opportunity to expand the Visa Commercial purchasing network, especially through the distribution of purchasing cards - but there was a problem.
HUMAN CENTERED DESIGN APPROACH
BARRIERS TO GROWTH: Setting up and distributing purchasing cards was a very technical task. As a result Visa’s customers (banks) were relying on network engineers to set things up for them every time they wanted to get started or to manage the process. This was creating long lag times and limiting the growth of the purchasing card network.
Visa purchasing card + amazon business Account + bank of america
EVALUATION
Visa Commercial’s fragmented ecosystem undermined their customers’ ability to get anything done.
Because the users of the Visa Commercial website were highly technical network engineers, the experience didn’t need to be simple or easy to use. The ecosystem had 15 teams at Visa working on separate, individual applications, each of which was targeting a different task.
INTEGRATING THE PLATFORM: Because of this fragmented ecosystem with all of these players pulling in different directions there was a huge bottleneck of transactions. We hosted a design thinking workshop where we brainstormed ways to integrate the Visa Commercial platform.
fragmented ecosystem whiteboard image
TARGET CUSTOMER
Corporate Accounts Payable is stuck in the spend management dark ages.
We decided to focus on Accounts Payable as our target customer. Making their job easier would naturally lead to increases in the number of transactions made through the Visa Commercial platform.
visa commercial transaction ECOSYSTEM
KEY INSIGHT: Right now, Accounts Payable are still using checks and purchasing orders to do much of their corporate spend management. The whole process is highly inefficient and urgently needs to be modernized.
Sally from Caterpillar target persona image
CONCEPT
Visa Commercial’s purchasing cards are the future of corporate spend management.
People who are getting these purchasing cards will be able to buy and then track all their spending because their corporate accounting is now digital rather than paper purchase orders, checks, etc.
SERVICE MODEL
SERVICE MODEL: Using “Sally from Caterpillar” as a target persona.
1. Visa and Bank of America are working to help Sally at Caterpillar.
2. Sally distributes purchasing cards and plugs them into her accounting system.
3. Sally can then make purchases through Amazon business.
4. More transactions through the Visa Commercial platform/network.
1. Visa and Bank of America are working to help Sally at Caterpillar.
2. Sally distributes purchasing cards and plugs them into her accounting system.
3. Sally can then make purchases through Amazon business.
4. More transactions through the Visa Commercial platform/network.
onboarding
JOBS TO DO / INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE
Making a technical application engaging and easy to use for non-technical people.
The Visa Commercial platform in its current form is fragmented and technical. We need to make it simple for non-technical users (i.e. Accounts Payable and Corporate Buyers) to set up, distribute, and manage enterprise purchasing and spend management on their own.
information architecture
EASY TO SET UP, EASY TO VERIFY: We’re orchestrating our Service Model into a framework where Visa Commercial, Banks and Enterprise Customers collaborate on fulfilling the functional requirements of the system. The new platform design allows authenticated users to access/unlock all of the appropriate apps in the ecosystem.
AUTOMATING SPEND MANAGEMENT: This new approach to the platform would allow Accounts Payable to automate the majority of their transactions. Network engineers have an important role in the system, securing the endpoints and provisioning the secure network for the exponential increase in corporate financial transactions, but are no longer needed to process routine business requests.
Low fidelity flow example
DESIGN SYSTEM
The design system offers a sense of trust and provides positive reinforcement.
The UI elements are assembled into modular templates and flow patterns. We worked closely with the developers to optimize the Visa Commercial front end components for agile development.
The Design Principles support a clear, consistent, and easy to verify interface in the context of the highly regulated field of corporate finance. It should support the Visa Commercial brand - the world leader in commercial transactions. It has to improve customer engagement and satisfaction, removing the friction from business transactions that scale to billions of dollars.
VISA CASE STUDY: How to streamline a complex and fragmented transaction ecosystem of purchasing cards and business transactions
1. EVALUATE: To create simplicity, first embrace the chaos. Talk to stakeholders (there are 15 applications, all with project managers pulling in different directions) to understand their goals and priorities.
2. PLAN: Focus on the accountants distributing purchasing cards as target customers.
3. EXECUTE: Develop flows that integrate all 15 applications into a single web app and test how they work together. Create a design system that improves customer engagement and satisfaction, removing the friction from business transactions that scale to billions of dollars.
1. EVALUATE: To create simplicity, first embrace the chaos. Talk to stakeholders (there are 15 applications, all with project managers pulling in different directions) to understand their goals and priorities.
2. PLAN: Focus on the accountants distributing purchasing cards as target customers.
3. EXECUTE: Develop flows that integrate all 15 applications into a single web app and test how they work together. Create a design system that improves customer engagement and satisfaction, removing the friction from business transactions that scale to billions of dollars.