You get an independent, expert-led view of how your
network products compare to the industry.
Above the waterline sit the things everyone discusses — the business proposition, the customer journey, the risk concerns. Below it is the heavy lifting work: operating regulations, technical specifications, enablement and certification programs, partner implementations, and the technology build itself.
The risk is not that any single layer fails. The risk is that the layers compound. A regulation gap surfaces in certification. A technical specification gap surfaces in partner implementation. By the time the gap is visible above the waterline — in lost market share or stalled adoption — it is expensive to close.
Each product in scope is profiled on a one-page "baseball card" — a scorecard that captures the eight dimensions that decide whether a feature is a strength, a gap, or a risk. Across an engagement, we produce a card per product, a feature-by-feature comparison matrix, and a portfolio-level read of where you stand.
Our expertise covers the full surface of a modern payment network across hundreds of underlying features. You decide whether to go wide across all domains, or narrow and deep into the one that matters most for the decision in front of you.
Authorization, clearing & settlement, disputes, account management, on-behalf-of services, payment gateway, processing services, level 2 / level 3 data.
Onboarding, AML / KYC, fraud alerts and detection, liability protection, authentication services — biometrics, device intelligence, OTPs, passkeys, FIDO.
Tokenization & e-commerce, 3-D Secure, agentic commerce, digital wallets, click-to-pay, virtual card numbers, A2A, cross-border, open banking, transactional APIs.
Commercial cards, fleet, government, BNPL, installments, stablecoins, private label, credit, debit, prepaid, payment acceptance, merchant & partner enablement.
Travel benefits, rewards & loyalty, cardholder protection, emergency replacement, insurances.
Every benchmark follows the same four-phase approach. The depth of each phase scales with the engagement, but the structure does not change — it is what gives our deliverables their consistency, regardless of the scope you choose.
We analyze your products, assess the competitive landscape, identify the key patterns the engagement needs to test, and collect initial observations.
We conduct blind, anonymous interviews with subject-matter experts from our network to capture the market perspective and form the preliminary hypotheses we will test in the next phase.
We conduct the feature-by-feature comparison, technical reverse engineering, and use-case impact assessment needed to validate or refute each hypothesis.
We document conclusions, finalize the comparison matrix, and create and deliver the report alongside a structured readout to your team.
We bring the framework, the sources, and the expertise — you set the scope, direct the output, and together we decide where to go wide and long, and where to focus narrow and deep.
Every engagement produces a benchmark you can present to your board on the morning it lands. Detailed enough for product to act on. Structured enough for the roadmap conversation. Sourced enough to defend the recommendation.
The deliverable comes in three connected parts:
The landscape, mapped. Who is doing what, where the market is moving, and how your portfolio sits inside that picture — at the product, capability, and feature level.
Feature-by-feature scoring with clear indicators. Where you lead, where you trail, where you are on par, and the policy and technology reasoning behind each gap.
Concrete actions, complexity sizing, stakeholder benefits, and the cost of doing nothing — prioritized so the next roadmap conversation has a defensible starting point.
Upon delivery of the report, we schedule a readout session where we present the report to the relevant teams in your organization and conduct the set of Q&A sessions to explain the findings.
A complete feature-by-feature comparison matrix in Excel, an executive report in PDF with findings and recommendations, and a structured presentation readout to your team. Yours to take, share, and store.
The same analysis, delivered through our secure Explicit Intelligence environment. A living deliverable rather than a static one. Your team can continue interacting with the analytics through a chat agent, drill into the findings and reasoning, and revisit the analysis as the market moves.
The environment is bank-grade secure & ISAE 3402 audited.
The substance of the benchmark is the same in both formats. The difference is how you and your team continue to use it after the readout.
We bring the framework, the sources, and the expertise. You set the scope, and together we define the benchmark that best supports the decision in front of you.
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