Kunai Provides Mastercard Launchpad to Deploy Cutting Edge Business Tools to Smaller Merchants

Mastercard is a global financial technology company that provides payment processing services to merchants, banks, and other financial institutions. Founded in 1966, Mastercard has since grown to become one of the world's largest payment networks, processing billions of transactions every year in over 200 countries and territories.

Mastercard offers a range of payment solutions, including credit, debit, and prepaid cards, as well as mobile payments and other digital payment technologies. The company is headquartered in Purchase, New York and employs over 20,000 people worldwide.

To the world's top corporations, Mastercard is more than just a payments pipe. Its consulting services propel business decisions with high-impact analytics and insights that drive growth.

However, these services are usually unavailable to smaller merchants. Average merchants are consigned to inefficient, inaccurate analytics born from cobbling together third-party data and reliance on approximate conversion analytics.

In 2018, Mastercard sought to put these powerful tools within reach of every Mastercard merchant, regardless of size. However, they first needed prototyped designs and development plans to show to stakeholders.

Having worked with Kunai in the past for similar projects, Mastercard entrusted Kunai with the goal of designing a modular platform able to aggregate relevant information for specific merchants.

Kunai was tasked with visualizing a platform that merchants could easily adopt and integrate into their existing systems. This platform, a BI Sales Portal, would provide merchants a compliant way to visualize an overview of business performance against local competition, customer behavior and conversion analytics, and sector trend to measure competition in a specific geographic area and industry.

Kunai’s teams began work on the new platform, designating teams to UX/UI and development sprints to create rapid prototypes and development plans.

Throughout a two and a half day sprint, Kunai gathered data to prototype the sales portal design and build plan. Kunai got to work designing the portal from the merchant's point of view as well as various management and configuration screens from Mastercard’s point of view.

For the development plan, Kunai’s developers came up with a plan to build the application within MC Connect, since the idea was to eventually launch this suite of tools through Mastercards pre-existing distribution network via MC Connect.

By laying the groundwork for the new BI Sales Portal, Kunai established a foundation for Mastercard partners to better understand their markets, customers, and sales efficacy.

Kunai supported Mastercard in building a modular platform able to monitor point-of-sale performance and customer behavior against similar competitors, and included the option to drill data by size, geography and industry.

Mastercard is now positioned as a value-added service provider, instead of just a transaction-based network, giving partners access to clear and concrete insights that guide their business decisions.

“Being able to participate in Mastercard’s quest to bring powerful tools to more businesses has been such a fulfilling journey for us. We get to take a look into the inner workings of a massive giant like Mastercard and gain inspiration for our own futures, goals, and aspirations.” - Sandeep Sood, CEO @Kunai.