Tapmad Wallet/Billing Migration: 50% to 1%
Migrated subscription billing off high-cost rails and rebuilt wallet/DCB flows, payment cost from 50% to 1%.
What this is, in one paragraph.
Diagnosed unit economics as a payments problem, not a pricing problem. Rebuilt rail mix, retries and dunning around wallet/DCB economics, pulled payment cost from ~50% to ~1% of revenue while scaling to 5M+ paid subscribers.
“Migrated subscription billing off high-cost rails and rebuilt wallet/DCB flows, payment cost from 50% to 1%.”
Subscriber cohorts route across DCB, wallets and cards by cost, success and lifecycle. Retry orchestration and dunning are platform services, not per-rail glue, payment cost fell from ~50% to ~1%.
The job to be done.
Tapmad's subscription business was being eaten alive by payment cost, operator and aggregator margins consumed up to half of revenue, capping growth and ARPU.
What we shipped.
- Re-architected billing to prefer wallet, DCB and direct bank rails
- Smart retry and dunning flows tuned per rail and per cohort
- Pricing and packaging changes aligned to rail economics
- Reconciliation against operator settlements to recover leakage
How it's put together.
- Rail preference engine per subscriber state and prior failure history
- Per-rail retry curves instead of a single global retry policy
Where I sat in the work.
Drove the payments product strategy, vendor renegotiation and the cross-functional migration with growth, finance and engineering.
What moved.
- Reduced payment cost from ~50% to ~1% of revenue
- Scaled to 5M+ paid subscribers
- Increased ARPU by 70%
What I'd take into the next build.
- Payment cost is a product variable, not a procurement one.
- Retries and dunning are growth levers when rail economics are understood.
Relevance to networks, PSPs and cross-border platforms.
Every subscription, marketplace and creator platform inside Visa/Mastercard/Stripe portfolios eventually faces this. The playbook ports directly.
Discussing payment infrastructure / product leadership roles?
Reference-available. Download the résumé or get in touch.
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