An Article on Creating an Industry Standard…
Do you use a Virtual Card? And are you one of those who raise the limit while making a purchase and then reset it to zero? Or do you keep a limit on your card small enough that you'll never be upset? In this article, I'll tell the story of this feature—now an ordinary industry standard offered by every bank. Because, no need for modesty, I am the product manager who invented this feature and brought it to market.
Yes, we are at the end of the '90s and the beginning of the 2000s. The dot-com wind is blowing strongly in Türkiye, as it is all over the world. New ads appear every day; Banu Alkan stars in commercials for the internet service provider İxir, the local Amazon, Deppo, emerges as an e-commerce platform, and Migros makes its first Virtual Market attempts. At that time, I was a Product Manager at Pamukbank, one of Türkiye's most prominent banks. The bank was extremely innovative; credit cards were every bank's flagship product back then, and banks were in a fierce race to be the “first” with every innovation…
Our bank, too, was aiming to be one of the first 3 banks to launch the virtual card. The project had been given to a colleague, but this colleague, tired of the corporate order, left the company while the project was still in its early stages. At that time, our Head of Retail Banking, Sertaç Özinal, with the departing colleague's file in hand, gave me the job of launching the card. Of course, by the time we brought the new card to market in all this commotion, other banks had already released the product. We weren't first; we worked hard to catch the train at a reasonable point.
At that moment, I had one more big project in hand: the Supplementary Card project. Here, we wanted to liberalize the supplementary card's limit management and give it to the main cardholder within certain authorizations. I was working on it with the IT department. In their architecture, they called the main card the “master” and the supplementary card the “slave.” In our project, the main cardholder could set the supplementary card's limit themselves 4 times a year. Inflation was (again) high in those years, limit needs increased during the year, and if we gave the authority to the cardholder, a serious operational burden would be lifted off the bank.
Anyway, when this virtual card project was also given to me, the first thing I did was have Veri Araştırma, the research firm we worked with at the time, conduct a market study. I always say in my seminars that you must always start the work by understanding the customer and their needs. The survey results revealed that, at other banks, users were hesitant to use virtual cards due to security concerns. Yet we wanted to launch the card and get it used amid this internet craze. An idea came to me: what if we defined the physical card as the “master” in the system and attached the virtual card to it as the “slave”? Even one step further—what if, as in the supplementary card project, the cardholder could increase their limit as needed and bring it down to zero after shopping, so that even if the card fell into someone else's hands it couldn't be used? What if we went even further and gave this right to change it without limit? That is, they could raise and lower the limit as many times as they wanted per day, per week, per month? Eureka! I had found the idea I was looking for.
I immediately rushed to IT, to İbrahim Osmanoğlu, who was in charge of all the card software. At that time, İbrahim Bey and his team had become masters of Cardpac, Schlumberger's credit card management software used by many banks worldwide; with the ingenious additions they made to it, they had introduced points and air-mile features and added an installment feature—so much so that the Schlumberger team came to our bank from abroad, from headquarters, to understand how these “patches” had been made, trying to learn from the team how they did these additions… I explained the matter to İbrahim Bey and asked whether we could give the job of setting the card limit to the cardholder. He said we could. I asked whether we could allow an unlimited number of changes. He said we could. I asked whether they could even set their limit to zero. He said we'd make it happen.
IT completed the virtual card development in a short time in accordance with the definition I laid out, and we launched the product. A quarter of a century has passed. Pamukbank has, unfortunately, been erased from the Turkish banking scene. Technology has changed many times. But this feature, which takes its foundation from a solid consumer insight, still remains current 25 years later and has become a standard in banking. This is one of the achievements I am most proud of in my career.
Yes, this is the origin story of this feature that perhaps you use too. Now to the moral of the story… The principles I want to share here still hold true today:
1- Define your customer correctly
2- Know your customers' needs very well; always keep the customer's need at the forefront when designing your products and services
3- Internal coordination matters: the more harmoniously the different units in the company work, the faster and more successful the result
4- The ones that last are not the “first” or the “most,” but the solutions that serve the right need
And if you're wondering how we'll put this into practice in our own field… For that too, my colleagues at Platin Yaka and I are ready to bring our decades of experience to bear on solutions tailored to your business. You can visit my page on Platin Yaka and book an appointment for an introductory meeting. If you're a technology startup, I've set up a discount coupon to support you in doing business with your limited resources—you can message me on LinkedIn and ask for your coupon.
