Pine Labs, the leading omni-channel commerce platform in India, Southeast Asia and the Middle East, set out to create a mobile wallet solution that would help merchants drive a seamless gift card experience for their customers.

Qwikcilver, Pine Labs’ Gift Card offering, partnered with Badge to power the launch of mobile wallet gift cards to align with Google Wallet’s launch in India.

The Challenge

Pine Labs has a big opportunity: the gift card market in India is expected to increase from $7.6 Billion in 2023 to $15.7 Billion by 2028. Gift cards are ubiquitous in the Indian market and usage is accelerating.

But despite growth, the customer experience has historically been lacking. Often a person may have multiple gift cards for a single merchant, which can be hard to keep track of and easy to lose. And customers historically redeem their gift cards via non-standardized and cumbersome processes across merchant websites, emails or sorting through their wallet to find the physical card.

The experience was lacking for merchants too. Merchants didn’t have a go-to channel to connect with customers beyond the initial gift card transaction. After gift card redemption or expiration, they’d see a huge drop off in customer engagement and retention.

The Solution

With the launch of Google Wallet in India, slated for May, 2024, Pine Labs had an opportunity to coincide a launch of their new mobile wallet gift card solution.

To build this experience, Pine Labs chose to partner with Badge because of the flexible and intuitive APIs and technical support. Together, the two teams collaborated on custom solutions designed for Pine Labs’ use case, including:

• Enhanced financial security via a bolstered authentication flow. A merchant’s customers are required to authenticate with their mobile number, gift card number and PIN in order to install their pass.

  • Webhooks that ensure real-time updates to gift card pass’ balances, so a customer always knows how much funds they have left.

  • Aggregate gift cards that consolidate multiple gift cards owned by a single customer, offering a streamlined experience to manage and track gift card balances.

  • Mobile wallet search, to ensure that customers could find gift cards by merchant name within their Google Wallet.

In addition to partnering with Pine Labs, Badge partnered closely with the Google Wallet team to ensure all three teams were in lock step, and the experience was thoroughly QA’ed before going live.

Results

In May, 2024, Pine Labs successfully launched their Google Wallet Gift Card experience in India. Since then, Badge’s frictionless customer experience has enabled a 74% gift card activation rate from merchants’ customers. Each gift card installation represents a customer now eligible to receive push notifications and location-based messages at any time.