Challenge
A foreign service accepts an international card. The buyer in Uzbekistan has a local one. Between the two there is nothing, and the purchase does not happen.
Closing that gap means taking on both sides: accepting money through the local system, and paying for the service somewhere that has never heard of it.
Solution
The service worked as an intermediary with clearly divided responsibility. The buyer paid with a familiar card in the national currency, the payment was confirmed on our side, the rate was fixed, and the order went for fulfilment.
Fulfilment was verified separately, because money taken for a service that was never delivered has to be returned rather than sorted out later. The rate is fixed at the moment of the order and never recalculated, or the final amount stops matching the one the buyer was promised.
Architecture and implementation
What the service carried:
· a catalogue of foreign services and online games
· payment with local cards in the national currency, with the rate fixed at order time
· order fulfilment with the result verified
· refunds when the service was not delivered
The buyer kept an order history, and that history closed most questions before they reached support.
Result
The service launched in 2018 and bridged the gap between local cards and foreign marketplaces.
It is an early version of the problem we still solve in cross-border payments today. The sides are unchanged: local money here, the service over there, and an obligation in the middle to lose neither.
