Service levels your partners can actually measure
When did your team last claim a service credit from a sponsor bank, PSP or KYC vendor? If the answer is never, perhaps every partner met every target. In our experience it is more likely that nobody on your side could show they had missed one.
Service level schedules are usually negotiated by legal and procurement during contracting and then filed. The operations team that deals with the partner every day may never have read the schedule, and when they do, they find targets described in ways nobody can check. Fixing that is unglamorous work on definitions, and it pays off the first time a partner's performance slips.
Where the clock starts and stops
Take a hypothetical KYC vendor contract promising that 95% of identity checks complete within 60 seconds. Complete could mean the vendor returned a pass or a fail. It could also mean the vendor returned "referred for manual review", which is a response but gives your onboarding team nothing to act on. If referrals count as complete, the vendor can meet the target on paper while more and more of your applicants wait hours for a person to look at them. KYC backlogs have enough causes already without a contract that hides one.
Sponsor banks and PSPs raise the same issue with investigations. A target to respond to a payment investigation within one business day is normally met by an acknowledgment. What your customer wants is resolution: the funds found, returned or confirmed as delivered. Measure both, and put a target on resolution too, even if it is looser and comes with exclusions.
Check what "business day" means while you are there. Since the UAE federal government moved its weekend to Saturday and Sunday in January 2022, and most private companies followed, UAE and European weekends line up. Public holidays still differ, and a one-business-day target can stretch well past a day around Eid or a European bank holiday.
For each line in the schedule, you should be able to write down five things.
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The event that starts the clock
A specific, logged event, such as an API request received or a ticket created in the partner's portal. "When we become aware" cannot be measured by anyone.
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The event that stops it
A final outcome wherever one exists. Interim states like referred or pending should be listed as not stopping the clock.
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Whose timestamps count
Yours, the partner's, or both with a rule for reconciling them. If only the partner's system records the events, you are relying entirely on their report.
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What is excluded
Planned maintenance, incidents caused by your own systems, and business hours defined once against both sides' calendars.
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What happens after a miss
A credit, a root-cause report within a set number of days, a remediation plan, and rights that apply if misses repeat.
Measuring from your side
The partner will send a monthly report, and it is their view of the month. Record your own timestamps at the boundary: when your system sent the request, when the response came back, when a ticket went to the bank's operations team and when it was closed. For work that runs over email with a sponsor bank, that may mean a shared mailbox and a log someone keeps by hand. It is crude, and it is still evidence.
When your numbers and theirs differ, the gap tells you something. It usually points to a definition problem: they stop the clock at acknowledgment and you stop it at resolution, or they count business hours in their time zone. Agree in the contract which source wins, or how the two will be reconciled, before the first disagreement. If DORA applies to you or your clients, contract terms with ICT providers are probably under review already (we wrote about that here). That review is a good moment to fix the service level definitions in the same pass.
If the only record of a missed target is the partner's own monthly report, the target is doing very little for you.
Service credits nobody claims
Credits go unclaimed for ordinary reasons. The contract requires a written claim within a set period after month end, with evidence. The amount is small next to the partner's fees and the effort of building the claim. The people who notice misses sit in operations, while the people who know the claim process sit in legal or finance. And nobody wants to be the person who annoyed the sponsor bank over a few hundred dollars.
We think the main use of a credit is the record it creates. Calculate it every month even if you decide not to claim, and tell the partner in writing, with something like: "We measured 91% against a 95% target in January, which under the contract is a credit of X. We are not claiming it this month." Six months of those notes carry weight in a renegotiation. They also make it easier to use the remedies that matter more than credits: a root-cause report, a remediation plan, the right to move volume elsewhere, or termination rights after repeated misses.
Reviews that use data
A quarterly review is more useful when you arrive with your own numbers. Send them a week ahead: the monthly figures from your side, where they differ from the partner's report, and the longest-running open cases with their ages. Beyond the numbers, the agenda should cover incidents in the quarter and whether the agreed actions were closed, changes coming on both sides (their releases, your volume forecast, new products), SLA definitions that have turned out to measure the wrong thing, and any changes to who staffs the partner's operations desk.
Leave each review with actions, owners and dates in the same log you use for internal actions. If the schedule itself needs changing, raise it at the review. Contract amendments can take months, and the next renewal is the natural point to land them, so the conversation should start well before it.
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