Step 01 — Discovery
Recurring payment failures that nobody had traced to their root cause.
CPay was processing government payments across Liberia when a pattern emerged in the support data: a disproportionate number of failed or misdirected payments were linked to account number entry. Staff were manually entering Basic Bank Account Numbers (BBANs), and the system had no validation layer to catch errors before processing.
The support tickets described the symptom — payment failed, payment went to wrong account — but nobody had traced the root cause. I pulled three months of failure logs and found that 68% of payment errors were attributable to BBAN entry mistakes.