Democratising payment network knowledge: how AI empowers Operations and IT teams for next-gen card services

The heartbeat of modern card issuing lies in its operational agility and the speed of its technology delivery. However, this agility is often undermined by a pervasive, internal enemy: the knowledge silo.

There's an operational chasm between the Scheme Compliance specialists (who receive and interpret the mandates from Visa, Mastercard, and other networks) and the Card Payment Operations and IT teams (who are responsible for implementing those changes). For these technical and operational managers, the experience is defined by reactive dependency: waiting for complex, second-hand information, which leads to challenging planning, missed deadlines, and high-stress operational changes.

This is where Payment Intelligence intervenes, using AI to dismantle these silos, turning proprietary network knowledge into a shared, operational asset.

The cost of knowledge dependency

The Card Payment Operations Manager, responsible for processes like transaction processing, clearing, and settlement, needs to proactively adjust procedures based on scheme updates. Similarly, the IT Manager needs early sight of mandates to schedule development resources for system updates.

Their collective pain is clear: dependency on a single, specialised team (Scheme Compliance).

Late awareness: Updates are often received too late for proactive resource planning, resulting in reactive operations rather than proactive planning.

Interpretation overhead: When updates finally arrive, they often lack the operational or technical context needed, forcing further, time-consuming consultations with the Compliance team.

This lack of velocity prevents institutions from leveraging scheme mandates for competitive advantage and leads to costly, last-minute scrambles to comply.

The AI solution: making knowledge accessible

Within Kajo, our ‘Ask KI’ feature, gives you instant answers to questions about any bulletin, right where you're already working. ‘Ask KI’, built directly into Kajo, is the first step in Kajo Intelligence, a suite of AI Assistant features designed to simplify card network compliance and save you time finding information you need. It solves the knowledge silo problem by functioning as an AI-powered payment knowledge hub. This solution dramatically enhances the ability to query and extract highly specific, trustworthy information from massive, complex documentation sets.

Translating compliance into operational requirements

Kajo's core intelligence is its ability to apply expert-level metadata tagging to every scheme document.

A complex Visa rule isn't just tagged as 'Mandate.' It's tagged: Network: Visa, Region: Europe, Impact: IT/Processing/Authentication, Action: New Field Required, Deadline: Q3 2026.

The Kajo Intelligence layer then uses this metadata to automatically translate the source document into department-specific summaries. The IT Manager doesn't read the compliance PDF. They may instead choose to read the AI-generated summary: "Mandatory system change to API x required by Y date for Digital Wallet processing in Region Z."

This capability is how Kajo directly addresses the pain of late access and eliminates the dependency on the SC team. Knowledge is no longer siloed. It's contextualised and routed to the right teams.

Empowering proactive workflows

By democratising access to this intelligence, Kajo empowers non-compliance teams to shift from firefighting to strategic planning. Compliance management is now a shared, systemic responsibility, rather than a single team's burden.

IT: proactive planning and resource allocation

With instant, specific insight into technical mandates, the IT team can plan changes proactively. They can schedule system updates and resource allocation months in advance of the deadline, drastically reducing implementation costs and avoiding expensive vendor negotiations under pressure.

When a scheme announces a new technical best practice that unlocks a competitive product feature (faster dispute resolution flows, for example), the IT team has the validated knowledge to begin development immediately. This accelerates time-to-market in a meaningful way.

Operations: assured process readiness

The Operations Manager gains clarity on new or modified operational procedures. For example, a change in clearing processes or fraud reporting requirements is flagged instantly, allowing them to update internal Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) and train staff before the mandate takes effect. This ensures easy audit and traceability of the process because the entire implementation workflow (from alert to development ticket to operational sign-off) is tracked within Kajo.

The workflow that connects everything

Kajo's compliance management and workflow features (task assignment, deadline tracking, evidence logging) become the system that connects the now-empowered departments. They're the scaffolding that ensures the entire organisation acts on its shared intelligence, turning the competitive knowledge gained into auditable, executed reality.

The efficiency gained by IT and Operations then directly allows the Scheme Compliance team to focus on higher-value activities, such as community knowledge sharing and high-level strategic interpretation, rather than manual document distribution.

Velocity through unified knowledge

The most successful card issuers in the next decade will be those that master organisational velocity. This speed isn't achieved by hiring more compliance staff, but by deploying AI-driven Payment Intelligence to make compliance knowledge accessible, relevant, and actionable across every impacted department.

For IT and Tech Delivery teams, late access and dependency on compliance teams transforms into proactive development planning and faster technical deployment. Card Operations teams move from reactive changes and manual process updates to real-time procedural updates and guaranteed operational readiness. Meanwhile, Scheme Compliance teams benefit from automated knowledge distribution, freeing them to focus on strategic expertise rather than manual workload and siloed interpretation.

By breaking down the knowledge silos, Kajo unifies the organisation's response to the fast-moving payment networks, ensuring operational efficiency, reduced risk, and sustained competitive velocity. It's not just about staying compliant anymore. It's about staying ahead.