ACH: A switch to pass on credit card fees while allowing customers a fee-free way to pay

Summary

Payments · Self-service · Compliance · Responsive web · AI-assisted prototyping

Product Designer, sole designer, from research through engineering handoff.

Context

DAT's subscription customers, mostly small carrier owner-operators, could always pay by credit card at no extra cost. In 2026, leadership decided to stop absorbing those processing fees: card payments would carry a surcharge, and paying by bank account (ACH) would cost nothing extra. The surcharge could only go live if customers could actually reach that fee-free option.

Problem

Setting up bank payment meant calling the billing team, then e-signing an authorization form sent by email. The customers most likely to want to avoid the fee had no way to switch on their own.

Approach

I studied how other products handle bank-account setup, from multi-day micro-deposit verification to a single page of fields, which gave the PM and me a real range to choose a position within. We chose no micro-deposits and a minimal form. I cut the bank-details section from ten fields to five and brought the emailed authorization into the app as a consent step. I also partnered with legal so that anyone about to pay by credit card sees the surcharge first, along with a fee-free way around it.

Result

Release 1 shipped on July 1, meeting leadership's mid-year target. Customers can now add a bank account and accept the authorization without a phone call, and roughly one in six customers adding a payment method choose bank payment. To ship on time, we left ACH out of Pay Now and reactivation; debit cards, which don't carry the surcharge, covered those flows in the meantime.

What's next

Release 2 is designed: ACH in Pay Now and account reactivation, choosing a saved payment method during reactivation, and removing a checkbox that implied a choice the app didn't honor. It's waiting on prioritization and a session with a tech lead on the remaining technical details.

How I worked

I prototyped the flow in GitHub Spark before I was assigned to the project, then brought those prototypes into stakeholder meetings so we could settle the workflow on a shared screen. I used an AI assistant to draft the customer journey from the design documents, and worked through it from there. After Release 1, I moved to Claude Code and built runnable Release 2 prototypes for engineering.