Vendor card acceptance
Our vendor card acceptance tool helps customers determine which of their vendors will accept card payments. By putting more spend on their card, they can earn more rewards.
My Role
Senior Designer
Team
Amy Higgins, Design Lead
The journey
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Card Accept tool launches in early 2024
This internal associate tool allows relationship managers to help their medium to high-touch customers identify cardable vendors.
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Strategy begins for direct-to-consumer late 2024
A small group made of cross-functional team members come together to workshop how we can bring card accept directly to our digital, low-touch customers.
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Incremental MVP testing launches in 2025
The outcome of the 2024 workshops and strategy efforts was a push for incremental testing with Q2 interest tests and a single search MVP tool to be released in Q3.
Our target audience
While we have an internal card accept tool that can be used by field associates for our high and medium-touch customers, they only represent 25% of purchase volume (pvol) for the business sector. Bringing a card accept tool to our self-service, light-touch customers allows us to target $120B in spend.
High-touch
Purchase volume = ~$12B
Commercial card customers that are provided with “white-glove” services by Customer Success Managers.
Medium-touch
Purchase volume = ~$28B
Commercial card and small business customers that are supported by Relationship Managers.
Light-touch
Purchase volume = ~$120B
Small business customers that are not supported by the field and are largely self-service.
What we know about our customers
The team participated in empathy mapping to better understand and align on customer attitudes and behaviors related to payment habits, data-sharing, and rewards… all of which are variables that play a large part in what would be our vendor card accept experience.
Our customers…
✔︎ Want to earn more rewards
✔︎ Have concerns around security
✔︎ Need to see the value of their data-sharing
✔︎ Have mixed feelings about manual vs automated processes
The MVP design
Our MVP design brings the vendor search functionality from our internal tool directly to customers to allow them to search for their own vendors.
Within the results, we highlight the rewards potential and provide next steps to guide customers towards a switch to card payment.
Another example of a result, where the content is altered to provide appropriate guidance.
Relevant resources provide our customers with pathways elsewhere in the platform and encourage use of other products such as Accounts Payable.
What we’re looking to learn
In order to understand the value of card acceptance
🧭
Motivation to explore
Does the rewards value proposition motivate customers to look into the card accept tool?
Measured by impressions & click-through🧑💻
Willingness to share
Are customers comfortable with sharing their vendor data with Capital One?
Measured by engagement (searches)💳
Ability to drive pvol
Are we providing customers with enough information to convert payments to card?
Measured by payments to cardTesting our MVP
I tested the MVP design with 6 customers to assess usability and comprehension of the search tool and, overall, the reaction was positive.
Key takeaways
The tool is easy to use and understand
The reactions to the rewards potential shown in the results was very positive, reinforcing our value proposition
All participants understood the card acceptance results and the next steps provided.
“I think it’s a great, unique idea and I do think people would like to use it. I would like to use it.”
While the MVP tool is in development, we launched two in-market tests
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Test 1: Accounts Payable
To get initial reads on interest in a vendor card acceptance tool, I collaborated with the Accounts Payable team to design a widget for placement within their Action Center.
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Test 2: Business Dashboard
Within the Rewards tile on the new business dashboard, I collaborated with the dashboard team and designed a multi-variant test to compare interest in a search tool vs. an ERP connection tool to receive card acceptance results.