Kunai Partners With Visa to Reinvent In-person Retail Experience

Visa Inc. is a leading global payments technology company, with a focus on electronic payments. Founded in 1958, Visa has since spearheaded the creation and implementation of a reliable network between banks, vendors, and customers.

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.

Since the turn of the century, merchants have been racing against rapidly developing technologies to constantly reinvent themselves in order to capture more and more market share. However, as more and more business trends towards online stores, customers from foot-traffic slip through the cracks.

In 2018, Visa recognized the need to bridge the gap between online stores and brick & mortar locations. Their vision for merchants included establishing a seamless connection between e-commerce and in-person retail stores. By taking advantage of the personalized online shopping experience, allowing customers to scan items and checkout through their phones, and applying it all to retail stores, merchants could recapture lost sales from neglected foot-traffic locations.

Kunai set out to develop a next-gen app that provided a real-time shopper status dashboard for merchants to observe and manage, while a customer-facing digital grocery store simulator and shopper wallet experience was built for iOS (specifically for iPhone and iPad).

Additionally, Kunai utilized LISNR ultrasonic frequencies and geo-fencing to allow merchants to beam personalized promotions straight to the customers in the store. Finally, when customers are ready to check out, they can scan and pay on the spot, right on their mobile device.

Meanwhile, we deployed hardware to modernize the brick & mortar retail experience in a few short weeks.

Kunai developed a next-gen app that allowed customers to engage with in-store items on their mobile devices, bringing their online behaviors into the aisle. Additionally, the relevant hardware to modernize the brick & mortar retail experience was deployed in just a few short weeks.

The resulting app shipped with a variety of different features. Users are given the option to enroll their payment card either via manual data entry or through OCR scanning technology. They may also link their bank accounts to the app via Plaid integration to gain access to a budgeting feature that tracks spending and notifies the user when approaching the defined limit.

The app also supports checkout in designated checkout areas (through geo-fences), receipt tracking and loyalty program integrations, and item scanning. Users may pick up and scan items as they shop, auto checkout from their phones with the connected payment card, and receive or spend loyalty points from stored receipts.

“It’s not every day you get to work on a piece of technology pushing the boundaries of an established market. You see ideas for fast, shop-and-go type stores being floated around by the likes of Amazon and other large enterprises. But to develop and deploy a fleshed out system for Visa? It’s been incredible.” - Andrii Gorishnii, Software Engineer