Click to Pay: Navigating Stakeholder Conflict to Ship a First-to-Market Experience
Situation
First to market, three stakeholders, one designer
Our CEO wanted Computop to be the first payment service provider in Germany to implement Click to Pay. Visa was funding the implementation for both us and our merchant, which gave them significant leverage over design decisions. The merchant, whose platform would carry the experience, had serious reservations about the UX Visa was prescribing. As the sole designer, I was the person who had to hold all of this together.
Task
Making three stakeholders' priorities fit in one flow
Visa wanted their specification followed step by step, protecting their onboarding goals for new cardholders. The merchant wanted a checkout experience their users would actually trust and complete. The CEO wanted to ship first, fast. My job, alongside the PM, was to find a path that delivered on launch without creating a user experience we would spend the next year fixing.
Action
Anchoring the design in a familiar mental model
With no existing Click to Pay implementations in Germany to reference, I looked at where users had already developed comfort with saved-card authentication flows. The closest parallel was PayPal: email-based recognition, authentication, card selection, one-click payment. Visa's own specification followed the same structural logic. My argument to all three stakeholders was that a user willing to try Click to Pay had almost certainly used PayPal, and designing to that mental model would reduce drop-off without deviating meaningfully from Visa's requirements. That framing gave us a shared reference point and reduced the surface area of disagreement.
The harder problem was the gap between what Visa required and what the merchant would accept. Rather than forcing a resolution that would satisfy neither, I proposed a phased approach: launch with a UX close to what we had designed and the merchant could support, then move toward full Visa specification in a second phase three months after launch. This gave the CEO his first-to-market milestone, gave the merchant a workable experience at launch, and gave Visa a committed path to their requirements.
Result
Launched on time, corrected on schedule
Click to Pay launched in July, making Computop the first PSP to offer it in the German market. The initial UX reflected our proposed approach, familiar and merchant-approved. Three months later we delivered the second phase, aligning more closely with Visa's specification as agreed. The phased structure turned a three-way conflict into a sequenced negotiation, and the product shipped without any party walking away from the table.
