Building the fintech delivery arm behind a national digital wallet

A new fintech capability inside an established business

The company already delivered established services to banks, including card acquiring, transaction processing, transaction monitoring and contact-centre services. Building a fintech arm meant moving into a different kind of work: creating digital propositions and taking them to market, while the company was still developing the internal product knowledge and delivery capacity to do so.

I was one of four leads tasked with setting up that capability. My remit was delivery. The immediate challenge was to create a credible route from proposition to operating product without assuming the organisation already had the specialist platforms, product practices or customer-support model in place.

Build the capability through partners, then own the outcome

Rather than attempting to create every platform capability from scratch, I developed a partner model with product solution providers that could supply the digital wallet platform. This gave the new fintech arm a foundation to build on while we developed the delivery and service capability around it.

The wallet was launched in partnership with a local telecommunications provider. I also created the contact centre to support customers through onboarding and day-to-day use. Those parts had to work as one proposition: the platform could enable transactions, but customers needed a clear way to join, understand and trust the service, and get help when something went wrong.

• Selected and coordinated specialist product solution partners
• Established the delivery capability around the partner platform
• Created the contact-centre operation for wallet customers
• Coordinated launch delivery with a local telecommunications partner

People and service standards were part of the product

The capability depended on people as much as platforms. I onboarded and directly supervised more than 30 aspiring team members, then introduced standards and operating procedures to support consistent delivery and service quality. The goal was to make a new team dependable while the product and its operating needs were still taking shape.

This was especially important because the market was not yet familiar with digital wallets or digital onboarding. Customers had to be comfortable trusting a new way to sign up and transact. Support, clear processes and reliable handling of issues were not downstream operations; they were part of earning that trust.

A product needed a route for learning after launch

Launching the wallet was not the end of product delivery. A new proposition in an unfamiliar market would need review, adjustment and prioritisation as usage and feedback exposed what should change.

I established a product review and enhancement forum to manage the backlog with the delivery and product stakeholders. It provided a regular place to assess proposed changes, make priorities visible and coordinate enhancements with the partner platform and the service operation.

• Structured review of product feedback and enhancement requests
• Visible backlog prioritisation and decision-making
• Coordination between product, delivery, partner and service teams

From unfamiliar proposition to meaningful adoption

The digital wallet reached more than 100,000 users within six months, according to the role summary in my CV. That milestone reflected a combined effort: the partner platform, the launch partnership, the team, the customer-support operation and the work required to make a new proposition understandable and usable.

The experience reinforced a practical lesson about building fintech inside an established services company. A platform partner can accelerate access to technology, but it does not provide the delivery engine by itself. People, operating standards, customer support and a product feedback loop are what help turn that platform into a service customers can adopt and trust.