Card issuers going global: why payment network compliance can make or break your launch

Expanding into a new market looks simple from the outside. Cards are already “global,” right?

Except… not quite. Behind the scenes, every market has its own rulebook and they don’t always line up neatly. What works at home rarely works abroad without rewiring your stack, your contracts, and sometimes even your team.

As one compliance lead told us:

“Too often expanding the teams is an afterthought. They think, how hard can it be? But if they're doing their own processing, they need not only compliance expertise, but also engineering power just to meet the rules.”

Where to start: the invisible layer

Your first stop isn’t local regulators. It’s the card networks themselves. Visa and Mastercard publish global rules, but hidden inside are country-by-country exceptions.

One example: surcharging. Most countries ban it. The U.S. and Australia and New Zealand for example don’t, but only under strict conditions. Your system has to handle that automatically. Hard-coding exceptions later is a recipe for lower acceptance rates and fines.

Local rules: same game, different playbooks

Note: the country examples below are illustrative, not exhaustive. They show typical issues you’ll meet, not every rule you’ll face in every market. Every region piles on its own requirements:

United States: no single federal privacy law, just a patchwork of regulators and state rules. And from April 2025, new DOJ rules restrict U.S. data flowing to certain countries, so U.S. requirements can intersect with foreign localisation rules and mean you need careful coordination with regulators and vendors

European Union: more harmonised, but heavy on detail. Strong Customer Authentication (PSD2), open banking APIs, and CESOP cross-border reporting in specific XML formats. Mess up the reports and you risk penalties.

China: personal data of Chinese residents must stay in China, unless you navigate a complex approval process. This isn’t a tech choice; it’s local regulations baked into your architecture.

Japan: certain payment and card activities require a registered entity on the ground. A digital-only presence usually isn’t enough.

Or as another expert put it:

“Some countries require a physical presence, an office in Japan, or local data storage in China. Others just want more transparency in fees, or reporting in the local language. The challenge is knowing which is which, early enough to plan.”

How many people do you really need?

Adding a market often means adding people. But the headcount is rarely planned early enough.

• If you lean on processors, you might get away with one compliance owner. Please remember, you .
• Running your own processing? Expect to hire at least one compliance specialist and extra engineers.
• Scaling across multiple high-regulation markets? Think dedicated teams: compliance, fraud, and risk split into their own lanes.

The key is to budget for this before launch, not after.

Kajo is the practical tool that transforms card network publications and geopolitical mandates into predictable, operational workstreams. It enables scaling without the typical operational trip hazards by centralising intelligence and automating the workflow.

Here is what Kajo Intelligence delivers in practice:

• Centralised, filtered knowledge: All relevant scheme updates from Visa, Mastercard, and other schemes are centralised and instantly filtered to your specific licences, products, and regions.
• Customisable impact framework: Define impact categories that map to your organisation (e.g. Data storage and protection where you could find 'DOJ Data Rule Impact,'or 'China Data Localisation Change' announcements if you are operating in those countries for example) for instant, relevant task generation.
• Automated task assignment & tracking: Automatically generate auditable tasks, assign owners (Operations, IT, Finance), and follow progress through to completion.
• Compliance status monitoring & forecasting: Use the dashboard to see in real time which global obligations are on track, overdue, or upcoming, allowing IT to proactively plan resources and stay ahead of deadlines.

The Kajo Intelligence platform turns a fragmented, knowledge-heavy international compliance requirement into a single, cohesive, and scalable process. It is the necessary bridge between geopolitical mandate and technical roadmap.

Scaling without tripping up

Compliance doesn’t have to slow you down, if you build it into your process. Best practices we’ve seen:

Talk to your own teams early. The ops folks already know what will break in a new market.

Invest in research up front. A few weeks of homework saves months of firefighting.

Automate where you can. Country-by-country rules belong in code, not spreadsheets.

Keep your partners close. Third-party processors help, but you’re still legally responsible.

How Kajo helps make payment network compliance operational

Kajo is built exactly for the problem above: centralising scheme publications, turning them into tasks, and keeping everyone aligned. It’s a single place to run the full scheme compliance lifecycle, with features designed to remove manual work and surface risks early.

Here’s what that looks like in practice:

• Centralised knowledge hub: all relevant scheme updates from Visa, Mastercard and other schemes. No more scattered emails or PDFs.
• Automated filtering: instantly separates what applies to you from what doesn’t, so you can focus on the real work.
• Customisable impact framework: define impact categories that fit your organisation, instead of forcing one-size-fits-all.
• Task assignment & tracking: create tasks, assign owners, and follow progress through to completion.
• Compliance status monitoring: see in real time which obligations are on track, overdue, or upcoming.
• Internal remarks & guidance: capture expert notes and internal interpretations for your teams, so everyone understands the “why.”
• Audit trail: full traceability of what was done, when, and by whom.
• Dashboard with forecasting: look ahead at upcoming tasks and compliance deadlines, not just today’s workload.
• Export capabilities: generate reports for management, regulators, or auditors in just a few clicks.

Put simply: Kajo turns the publications and bulletins by the card networks into operational workstreams, so compliance becomes a predictable process instead of a surprise.

The bottom line

International expansion isn’t just translating your website or adding a currency. It’s rebuilding parts of your business to fit into someone else’s rules.

The companies that succeed don’t treat compliance as a cost centre; they treat it as an integral part of their product and their infrastructure. By investing in Payment Network Intelligence in advance, they gain a much clearer picture of whether the local differences are insignificant or require a full-scale operational overhaul.

Or, to borrow the words of one of our experts:

“Invest some time in advance. That gives you a much better idea of whether the differences are insignificant, or whether you’ll need a whole new team.

Kajo is the solution that provides that foresight, helping you stop reacting to global scheme notices and start running them as part of your strategic, pre-planned roadmap. Book a demo to see Kajo in action.