Kunai Partners With Visa to Spearhead Widespread Adoption of Contactless Payment Technologies

Visa Inc. is a leading global payments technology company, with a focus on electronic payments. Founded in 1958, Visa’s major areas of activity include consumer and commercial credit and debit card services, as well as payment processing and other related services for financial institutions and merchants. Visa is considered to be one of the world’s most valuable businesses with over 20,500 employees worldwide.

In 2017, Visa recognized that emerging payment methods like NFC and QR codes were pushing their technology beyond simple card-swipe transactions. Looking to spearhead widespread adoption of these new technologies, Visa recognized the need to get governments and regulators to buy-in to these technologies.

Visa's Government Relations team tasked Kunai with building a demo that could explain these technologies to an institutional audience. Kunai worked with Visa to create an interactive app that could be used to visualize emerging payment technologies to mainstream audiences, decision makers, and government stakeholders.

Kunai got to work designing a multi-touchpoint ecosystem across two devices to simulate an exchange between the customer and the merchant. A tablet computer would run an app to simulate a checkout Point Of Sale (POS) terminal, while the phone could be used to emulate payment form factors.

Kunai would develop three distinct demo flows: 1. QR Code Payments 2. Contactless Provisioning 3. Contactless Payments

These flows would walk audiences through various transactions utilizing functions like scanning QR codes to selecting preferred payment methods.

The ultimate goal of the demo would be to offer critical, easy-to-grasp clarification and visualization in a highly regulated space.

Kunai built a fully functional demo that users could interact with to engage in a ‘boots on the ground’ walk through using emerging payment technologies.

The three demo flows function as follows:

QR Code Payments The smartphone will be connected to the tablet and give the appearance of a real transaction being processed. The user may use the phone to take a picture of the QR code on the simulated POS terminal to complete the transaction. Additional explainers can be built in to guide the regulator as to what is occurring during this process.

Contactless Provisioning This demo showcases a simulated process flow for entering card details and provisioning a tokenized version of the card data onto a payment wearable. This wearable could take the form of a ring, a "smartcard", or digital wallet. This will then lead into the Contactless Payment demo.

Contactless Payments The contactless payment demo will utilize the smartphone as the primary experience screen. The tablet will remain as a POS terminal and a simulated payment will be initiated. The POS terminal will confirm payment while the smartphone will show a notification that a payment was authorized using the payment ring.

“This project was an absolute thrill to work on. At the time, little did I know that we would be spearheading a demo that thousands of decision makers would see, use, and ultimately reference as they adopted contactless payment methods. Since 2018, the technologies we showcased in this demo have become ubiquitous everywhere around the globe, and it blows my mind that we helped make that happen.” - Omeid Eshraghi, Product Manager