Grow Your Credit Card Programs Without Growing Headcount
By Liz Froment, Contributor at The Financial Brand
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Credit card portfolios at community banks and credit unions keep growing. However, the operational functions needed to manage the program don’t always scale the same way. With every new account and transaction from card use, the bank has a growing list of items to manage, including disputes and compliance.
Providing the high level of service that customers demand often requires things that don’t get cheaper as they scale, namely people and infrastructure.
Need to Know:
- Servicing, disputes, fraud monitoring, and compliance create the most pressure as card portfolios grow. Workloads scale with account and transaction volume and staffing them requires specialized knowledge.
- Routine work doesn’t always have to be handled internally. Outside partners and automation can take on more volume without requiring operational headcount to grow.
- Outsourcing doesn’t eliminate the need for internal ownership. Institutions still need employees owning strategy, risk, compliance, vendor oversight, and customer experience.
- The goal is to free employees for work that drives growth. That includes acquiring cardholders, increasing activation and card use, preventing attrition, and improving customer relationships.
- Active accounts and cost per active account are better measures of efficient growth than revenue alone. A portfolio full of inactive accounts adds cost without adding value.
The challenge for many smaller institutions is how to manage back-office headcount when there’s growing demand for card products. It often comes down to figuring out which of these functions can be outsourced or automated, and which can be managed internally.
Where Growth Creates Pressure
As a credit card portfolio grows, certain operational functions often feel it first.
“Servicing, disputes, chargebacks, fraud monitoring, collections, and compliance typically create the greatest strain because the workload grows with both account and transaction volume,” Amanda Swanson, senior director at Cornerstone Advisors, a consulting and research firm serving banks and credit unions, told The Financial Brand.
However, adding more people to handle that volume isn’t always straightforward. Many of these roles require specific knowledge of regulations and network rules, making it harder to add headcount quickly when demand spikes.
Key insight: “Growth adds pressure across every operational function, but it hits hardest in the areas that require the most knowledge and experience,” Adam Neiberg, global banking product manager at SAS, a data and AI company, told The Financial Brand. “It starts at the front end with credit underwriting and continues through the ongoing work in fraud monitoring and dispute management.”
Disputes are one of the clearest examples. Globally, Visa processed 106 million disputes in 2025, a 35% increase from 2019. Independent Banker reports that disputes cost between $9 and $10 to fix and take an average of 2.5 phone calls per dispute to resolve. Those factors directly impact a bank’s bottom line.
“Dispute handling is labor-intensive and seasonal, with regulated response times,” Steven Leitman, managing partner at Consulting Resource Group, a boutique consultancy helping issuers and acquirers optimize profitability, told The Financial Brand. “Smaller FI’s often struggle to meet the peaks (e.g., January, post-holidays), which can result in escalated chargeback losses and write-offs.”
Card network compliance is another area that gets less attention. Leitman points out that networks issue hundreds of fee-related bulletins every year, and smaller banks may pay invoices without giving them much scrutiny since they can contain hundreds of line items. His firm’s analysis typically identifies potential reductions of 7 to 15% of total card network invoice costs. Keeping up with those charges takes time and knowledge that an understaffed team at a smaller bank or credit union may not have.
Where Institutions Can Grow Without Scaling Staff
One way community banks and credit unions can manage a card program without scaling headcount at the same rate is by turning to outside partners.
Neiberg says a common approach is working closely with a payment processor and card network to take on specific functions like transaction processing and network operations, as well as some parts of fraud monitoring. Other institutions prefer a turnkey issuing program where the provider runs day-to-day operations.
In either case, Swanson notes that the functions that move to the provider are those that scale with transaction and account volume, such as routine servicing, dispute intake, fraud monitoring, payment processing, and collections outreach. “Self-service, automated workflows, and AI-enabled employee tools can absorb more routine volume,” says Swanson. “Outsourced partners can provide the specialized infrastructure and staffing required for transaction-heavy work.”
Both Swanson and Neiberg say AI can provide another way to handle more volume without adding staff, particularly in fraud monitoring and credit and origination risk. Neiberg also notes that doing it responsibly requires clear and auditable trails showing who was approved, for what amount, and who is accountable for that decision.
Key insight: However, there are also trade-offs to consider, especially on interchange revenue. Leitman points out that “Under an outsourced program, the revenue will be significantly reduced, so it needs to be understood what the net impact is on the P&L.”
Even with outsourcing, Swanson says institutions still need people to own and manage product strategy, vendor oversight, risk, compliance, data governance, and the customer experience. When those teams aren’t buried in manual workflows to process disputes or fielding service calls, they can focus on acquiring new business and building better relationships with those members.
The example Swanson gives is moving from broad campaigns to more timely or behavior-based outreach, such as identifying cardholders who may be ready for a balance transfer offer, a different card product, or a higher line of credit.
How to Measure Whether It’s Working
Growing a card portfolio may be the primary goal, but it’s also important for the banks and credit unions running these programs to know whether the growth is efficient.
“Revenue is perhaps the most obvious metric, but active accounts are also among the most telling,” says Neiberg. “A card portfolio can easily grow the number of accounts, but if those accounts are not active, they’re a drag rather than a gain.”
Swanson says institutions should look at growth, efficiency, risk, and customer outcomes together. That means tracking things like how many accounts each servicing employee handles, what it costs to service each active account, how quickly disputes get resolved, and whether fraud false positives are creating unnecessary manual work.
“The key test is whether accounts, balances, and purchase volume are growing faster than servicing costs and operational staffing — without increasing risk or customer friction,” says Swanson.
Key insight: Getting to that number can be harder than it sounds. Leitman says issuers should aim for the fully loaded cost per active account, including network and processor fees. “This isn’t an easy number to arrive at, as many functions are shared and don’t handle just card-related activities,” he says. Disputes teams, for example, often handle ACH and other payment-related issues too. But it’s the number worth chasing if the goal is to make a real comparison between running a program internally and working with a partner.
Neiberg suggests benchmarking against peers as another way for an institution to see whether it’s actually improving or just growing. “Payment processors, card networks, or even third-party research vendors can often benchmark these figures with competitors anonymously,” Neiberg says.
Without tracking numbers or benchmarks, it’s easy to assume a growing portfolio is a healthy one. But it’s critical for smaller institutions, especially, to track efficiency along with growth to spot where back-office costs may be eating into the bottom line.
Making Growth Sustainable
A credit card program gives a community bank or credit union constant opportunities to connect with members. But managing the day-to-day operational functions like disputes, compliance, fraud, and servicing takes real resources, and the manual work involved can pull employees away from higher-value tasks.
As portfolios grow, finding ways to keep back-office headcount flat helps protect the bottom line and gives marketing and lending teams room to focus on the work that grows the business.
