The competitive edge: how AI-powered payment intelligence drives go-to-market speed for card issuers

The battle for top-of-wallet status isn't won by loyalty points alone anymore. In 2025, competitive advantage is measured by speed to market.

Issuers and FinTechs that can rapidly deploy new features capture market share and customer loyalty. Whether it's a seamless Tap-to-Pay digital wallet integration, a passkey-based authentication method, or a region-specific regulatory capability, being first matters. But there's one consistent bottleneck slowing everyone down: the sheer volume of payment network documentation.

This is where Payment Intelligence comes in. It's a shift away from reactive compliance, positioning scheme knowledge as the central engine for competitive product strategy.

The strategic cost of the 'compliance bottleneck'

For too long, the wealth of knowledge in scheme mandates, updates, and technical specifications has been locked away in complex portals, accessible primarily to specialised compliance teams.

This creates a real problem for product leaders. Innovation is delayed by interpretation.

When Visa or Mastercard announce a new capability (E.g. an update to tokenisation standards or agentic commerce), Product Managers need to know three things instantly:

• What is the new capability?

• How does it impact our current card portfolio?

• When must it be deployed to maintain compliance or gain a competitive edge?

In a manual environment, the process is reactive and slow. Compliance teams spend weeks sifting through hundreds of pages of PDFs and bulletins, interpret the technical language, and then manually translate it into a deliverable task for the IT or Product team. This knowledge latency is a direct, measurable loss of competitive opportunity. Product teams miss the window to be first to market, leaving the door open for faster, more agile competitors.

AI in card issuing: the rise of Payment Intelligence

Payment Intelligence applies advanced technology (particularly Generative AI and Machine Learning) to ingest, understand, contextualise, and operationalise global payment network documentation at scale. It moves past simple document storage and automated compliance tracking to provide strategic foresight.

Kajo, Rivero's Payment Intelligence Solution, embodies this shift. Instead of waiting for a compliance team to manually interpret a mandate, Kajo Intelligence has access to scheme manuals and guides to be able to give you instant answers to questions about any bulletin, right where you're already working.

From reactive compliance to proactive foresight

Traditional compliance tools focus on the what and the when of a deadline. Kajo shifts the focus to the why and the opportunity.

Contextualised knowledge: Kajo's AI ingests scheme documentation (Visa Business News, Mastercard Bulletins) and uses a custom framework to tag the content not just by region or deadline, but by its direct impact on specific banking products (Debit, Credit, Commercial) and internal processes (Fraud, Operations, IT).

Product feature discovery: This granular tagging allows Product Managers to search the entire global scheme knowledge base for features they didn't even know existed. For example, a query like "New ways to improve digital card issuance speed in Europe" immediately surfaces relevant technical specifications and best practice guides from multiple networks, presenting a direct path to a new, top-of-wallet feature.

Risk-Adjusted Innovation (Facilitated by Ask KI)

While Kajo's tagging handles the initial filtering and routing, the new Ask Kajo Intelligence (KI) feature brings the power of Generative AI directly into the moment of interpretation.

• Instant Summaries: Ask KI can summarise long and complex bulletin content in seconds.

• Focused Q&A: Users can ask questions about the mandate directly, e.g., "What are the relevant dates mentioned in this bulletin?" or "Is this mandatory for my Credit Card portfolio?" and Ask KI provides an instant, contextual answer based on the bulletin content.

By cross-referencing new product opportunities with the instant, reliable insight provided by Ask KI, Kajo ensures that innovation is compliance-by-design. This massively reduces the risk profile for new product launches, allowing for faster internal validation and sign-off from Risk and Compliance teams.

Kajo: the engine for accelerated go-to-market

For a Card Product Manager, Kajo delivers speed and strategic focus in three crucial areas, turning manual compliance workflows into automated, strategic intelligence loops.

Eliminate knowledge latency for product development

The time it takes to move from a scheme bulletin's release to a development ticket is drastically cut. Kajo's Agentic AI capabilities automatically identify updates relevant to, say, a 'Premium Credit Card Programme in APAC' and flag not only the compliance requirement but the potential competitive advantage it offers. This is the difference between learning about a new card authentication standard after your competitor launches it, and leveraging the information to launch it first.

Optimise IT planning and resource allocation

Card Payment Operations and IT teams are traditionally the last to receive scheme updates, forcing them into expensive, last-minute development sprints. Kajo addresses this by distributing clear, expert interpretation of scheme rules directly to the relevant IT teams. Planning can shift from reactive fire-fighting to proactive, scheduled development.

Compliance management and workflow automation are then handled by Kajo's built-in tools, ensuring that once the IT team implements a change, the compliance task is automatically tracked, auditable, and completed.

Financial strategy driven by real-time data

Even the Finance department benefits from this intelligence shift. Kajo publishes all scheme fees and interchange-related bulletins, ensuring the finance team is notified about the latest scheme fees changes or new fee structures. This allows for faster financial modelling and cost optimisation, such as identifying opt-out services to avoid paying for unused features, making sure every new product launch is not only competitive but also financially optimal.

From back-office cost to strategic intelligence

By adopting an AI-powered Payment Intelligence platform like Kajo, card issuers stop being passive recipients of scheme rules and become agile, knowledge-led innovators. They gain the confidence to move faster, design better, and consistently secure that coveted top-of-wallet position.