Payments Operations Product Strategy Ops Architecture Stakeholder Influence
Domain: Payments / Fraud & Disputes
Context: First card product launch at a European neobank — built from scratch against a fixed go-live date
Summary: Designed and delivered a chargeback intake and case management system under significant organisational and technical constraints, with foundations built to outlast the resources available to build them.
The analyst isn’t a faster case processor. The analyst is an exception manager. The computer handles the procedural. The human handles the non-procedural.
The problem Chargeback tooling is an afterthought at most financial institutions. The standard approach — a basic intake form, an ops queue, analysts improvising from there — creates compounding debt at every layer. The form captures what customers say happened, not what's needed to work the case. Unstructured input makes the data analytically useless and functionally inert downstream — you cannot query it meaningfully, and you cannot build automation on top of it. By the time the pain is visible enough to justify a fix, the form is load-bearing infrastructure that everything else was built around.
The context First card product launch at a European neobank. No existing dispute operation. Fixed go-live date. A one-time organisational window unlikely to reopen. Clear long-term goal — direct Visa network integration — on a timeline nobody could commit to.
The approach Rather than build a stripped-down version of the full vision and iterate, the founding decisions were treated as structural rather than provisional: intake designed as a translation layer between cardholder language and card network requirements, and tooling choices made honestly around what existed and had a clear owner — not what looked best on paper.
What it delivered