Ongoing elements your programme will need to consider the following:

Marketing Every successful card programme depends on active cardholders. So you may want your programme to attract as many as it can, as soon as it can. This means having a crystal-clear marketing strategy to attract the right people in the demographic you’re targeting. You’ll also need to comply with your card network’s brand requirements – for example, making sure the Visa or Mastercard logo is the right colour and size wherever it appears on your marketing communications. Both networks (schemes) have secured websites containing all these requirements.

Cardholder onboarding Once you’ve enticed people to join your programme, they’ll need to go through an onboarding process. This will include things like know your customer (KYC) checks as part of anti-money laundering (AML) regulations. It’ll also include collecting and validating data from them securely, before deciding what type of products to give them.

Customer service An essential component in building your card programme’s ongoing reputation and brand. Happy customers spend more, talk about and recommend products to others, and are more loyal to a brand, reducing churn and increasing their customer lifetime value (CLTV).

Dispute management Your organisation will need to respond to and manage disputes between customers, acquirers and issuers – by phone, by email, or through a website live-chat function. Every dispute management process is slightly different, so you’ll need to follow your issuer’s specific rules and be mindful that there are also geographical regulatory requirements related to fraud handling. If fraud is suspected, (rather than faulty goods, for example) there is also a reporting requirement.

Fraud management Technically, issuers (the financial institution) are liable for fraudulent transactions, yet have no immediate control (they retain overall control as the regulated entity but this has been delegated day to day to the programme manager) over how cardholders spend, how they’re communicated with, or a programme’s fraud monitoring processes. As such, issuers have their own risk policies and fraud processes you’ll need to comply with, such as monitoring transactions, managing alerts, and acting on any spikes in fraud.

Programme management As mentioned above, a programme manager brings together the building blocks mentioned in the section above. Very often they will also offer operational day to day activities as described. The offering will usually be an off-the-shelf and often inflexible solution that will meet network (scheme) and regulatory requirements but will not allow for a quick, agile iteration process and you will be reliant on the programme manager’s resources and speed to respond plus the associated costs for all operational activities, as well as any changes required as you launch and scale.