Background
I joined CarIQ, an early-stage startup to direct its product and development efforts. At that point, we were still trying to find product-market fit and examining the opportunities in the fleet space. After conducting a series of interviews with fleet manager, we found that the current payment solutions are offering a high friction and insecure experience to over 60m card holder.
We set ourselves to disrupt the market with a solution that could improve the following:
Payment system
All players are still running card programs with additional service layers to optimize the experience for fleets.
What if we could issue cards to vehicles instead of drivers?
Experience
Drivers have to carry a physical card that’s issued to them. The card could have limits on the amount and spending categories.
What if no card was necessary? Drivers could just push a button to full up their fuel tank?
Fraud Risks
Existing solutions have minimal visibility on how cards are used. They try to reduce fraud by putting limits and pins to log the fueling events.
What if we could use vehicle data to access and mitigate fraud risk.
Building identity for vehicles
Vehicles needed to have a verifiable identity to be able to transact. The company had the technical capability to injest vehicle data. I worked with the engineering and data team to design the following system.
This system output allowed us to verify vehicles and issue payment token for them at the time of transaction. That was the heart of our payment system which became company's patented IP.
Creating a seamless experience
The system was utilizing the VIN to identify vehicles but manually entering the number was a cumbersome task. So I asked how that cab be simplified. I used mobile and vehicle location data to display the vehicle to the driver’s profile.problem.
Building blocks for the ultimate vision
Our ultimate goal was to create an in-dash experience and designed the mobile app to align with the future direction of the product.
The optimal experience was to show the gas-station that matched the location of the driver. To reduce the fraud risk, we used the location of both vehicle and the app. After several field studies, we learned the occasional latency in the vehicle data sync was impacting the gas station display in the app.
To solve the problem, we expanded the radius and enabled the driver to pick the right gas station when more than one were found in the radius.
This was a negligible complexity on the user side but behind the scene, there were layers of security checks that made the transaction safe.
The fueling exprience
Once the security checks and selection are passed, the driver only needed to select the pump and start fueling.
We partnered with P97, the primary software provider for the gas-stations in the US and accessed the pump information and used their API to go through all the fueling steps.
Post fueling events
After the fueling event, with our access to the vehicle data, we can verify the fuel level. If the measured level was below a certain threshold, we flagged the transaction for review. Our admin panel allowed the fleet managers to review vehicle and their transactions.
Project takeaways
Sometimes complexity does not dissolve just by good design. It transforms from one form to another. I could make the CarIQ application supper simple by transferring the complexity to the sub-systems supporting it.
While developing that complex system was not cheap, the customers were valuing the innovative approach and its simplicity. With the promise to reduce the overhead and fraud risks, we were able to secure two customers immediately after our commercial release. My contribution to design and on-time delivery of this innovative payment product helped the company secure $15m investment.