A B2B payment cards issuing company has observed a sudden drop in the use of their cards on e-commerce platforms, in the month of april. Analyze the problem using appropriate assumptions. Suggest solutions to get the usage back on track.

Lets define the problem

1. B2B Payments cards : Company personnel use these cards for making payments on behalf of companies to other companies. This method means that companies do not need to use the older methods of bank to bank transfer or cheques to clear the payments.

2. Usage has dropped in the month of April. 

Assumptions

1. Usage was have been steady in the months before.
2. This is not seasonal. Means we havent seen this kind of degrowth previously in the month of April

1. Company issuing cards
2. Processing banks
3. Companies like Visa/Master
4. companies using the card
5. ecommerce sites

1. Usage : reduction in  transaction volume or value of transactions? : Transaction volume has reduced which in turn causes reduction in revenue
2. Has this been seen across ecommerce sites or one of the big players? across all sites
3. What about our customers? Are we heavily invested in few customers or a specific industry segment? - no

1. Has there been any downward ecomonic activity causing reduction in purchasing? No
2. Have we seen reduction in the usage in offline transactions? No

1. Are users making enough purchases? : Yes
2. Is there any specific problem in supply chain that item deliveries are affected? : No
3. Are customer paking payments? : No
4. Has there been no attempt to make the payment ? Customers are making attempts, however lesser number of people making attempts
5. Are we looking at problems with any specfic PG (Visa or MC) -. Visa
6.  Does it always fail? No

1. We should reach out to customers telling them about the problems with the PG
2. We should also look for enabling alternate payment methods. For the customers with heavy payments, we can look to deploy the payment machines
3. Work with major ecommerce companies to look for alternate PGs
4. We also need to see if we can power our cards using both PGs and let customers switch to another card
5. Work with ecommerce companies to suggest use of alternate card at the checkout window