01 · The ask
The company's reason and the customer's reason were not the same reason
The business ask was straightforward: shift customers to Pay by Bank and save on card fees. At grocery margins interchange is not a rounding error, and every basket that settles through a bank account instead of a card is money the company keeps.
No shopper has ever cared about that.
So the project had two problems stacked on each other. The company's problem was payment mix. The customer's problem was that they were juggling a loyalty account, a stack of clipped digital coupons and a payment method, and none of those things knew about each other at the register. The all-in-one QR code was the bonus for the consumer, and it was the only part of this a shopper would ever ask for.
Design's job was making sure the version customers wanted was the same version that did what the business needed. If those two came apart, adoption would settle it, and adoption always sides with the customer.
02 · Competitive research
Seven retailers, and one clear dividing line
I evaluated seven retailers running comparable programs. The split was not subtle.
The strongest, with Starbucks the clearest example, did all of it in one place. They rewarded loyalty, earned enough trust to hold payment, and ingrained the whole thing into the product until using it felt like a no-brainer rather than a decision.
The weak ones shared a single trait: they buried digital payment a submenu or two deep. Once that happens the feature effectively stops existing. It does not matter how good the flow is if a shopper never reaches it while standing in a checkout line with someone waiting behind them.
That finding redirected the project. If visibility was the deciding variable, the win condition was not a better wallet flow, it was surface area. And surface area at these brands was controlled by the loyalty teams, not by us. Which meant the real work ahead was convincing five brands' loyalty teams to put this in front of their users and back it with incentives worth a shopper's attention.
03 · The incentive
Asking someone to link a bank account is the hardest ask in consumer payments
People hand over a card number without thinking and then freeze at a routing number. A wallet that required bank linking was never going to win on convenience alone.
So we built the reason with the loyalty teams rather than around them, in two layers:
- A sign-on bonus, points or dollars back depending on the brand, to pay for the friction of enrolling.
- A long-term incentive on every use, so the wallet kept earning its place after the novelty of the bonus wore off.
The two-layer structure is the part that matters. A sign-on bonus alone buys enrollments, which looks like success on a dashboard and then decays quietly. The per-use reward is what converts an enrollment into a payment habit, and the habit is what the business was actually trying to buy.
04 · Priority mapping
Everyone got a seat at the table, and things got cut anyway
We ran a large workshop with designers, brand loyalty teams, in-store experience teams and store managers. Everyone had a seat. Not every idea made the MVP, and the most useful input came from the people closest to the floor.
A store manager told us his rural store had no wifi and unreliable cell service. His customers already struggled to load coupons. A QR code that had to keep refreshing was not going to work in his store.
That comment killed a core mechanic for part of the footprint. We shelved it pending a free in-store wifi rollout rather than shipping something guaranteed to fail in exactly the stores with the least tolerance for a broken checkout. No amount of remote research would have produced that sentence.
Second cut: we inherited someone else's design debt. The onboarding flow had existing problems in the accounts system that had to be fixed before a wallet could sit on top of it. That work landed on our team and extended our timeline to launch.
Third cut: native mobile wallet support. We dropped adding brand loyalty cards to Apple Wallet and equivalents. Only two of the five brands had that capability, and it could not carry payment. Keeping it would have split user attention between a native card that did half the job and an in-app QR code that did all of it. We sunset it for those two brands to keep everyone pointed at one thing.
05 · The constraint collision
Security wanted the code to keep changing. The stores could not always reach the network.
The QR code refreshed for two reasons at once. It had to pull in loyalty savings and clipped digital coupons so that a single scan carried everything a shopper had earned. And it had to expire, so that a screenshot could not be passed around and used as payment by someone who did not realize what they were holding.
Both of those requirements assume connectivity. Rural stores with weak wifi and patchy cell service do not reliably supply it.
This is the kind of conflict you cannot design away, only decide about. A static code works everywhere and is insecure. A refreshing code is secure and fails wherever the signal does. We kept the refreshing code and scoped the rollout to stores that could support it, which is why the shelved mechanic and the pilot's store selection criteria are really the same decision seen from two directions.
06 · The pilot
One store, six weeks, and a room full of trained cashiers
Giant was the brand the designs were presented in and the brand originally targeted for the pilot. The live test ran in a Food Lion location instead. The stores team picked it on three criteria: reliable wifi, existing loyalty adoption strong enough to give the wallet a base, and proximity to a regional corporate office so the pilot could actually be observed. The designs transferred to Food Lion's branding for production without rework, which was the first real evidence that the system held across brands.
The part that decided the outcome was not in the app. We partnered with the in-store team to train an entire store's worth of cashiers. They were the front line selling this. A shopper does not read about a new payment method. They have it explained at the register by someone they trust, in the ten seconds before they pay.
To be precise about the denominator, since it is the first thing worth asking: eligible meant in-store shoppers who either had no rewards account with the brand at all, or had a loyalty account but were not enrolled in any form of digital payment. Existing digital payment users were not in the pool.
I handed off a few weeks into the pilot, when my contract ended. I took this from nothing to a validated in-store test. I was not there for whatever the wider rollout became.
07 · What this project actually was
The hardest tradeoff was not a design tradeoff
The wallet was the artifact. The work was alignment.
Five regional grocers, each with its own voice, its own target demographic and its own brand standards. Loyalty teams with their own roadmaps and their own incentive budgets. In-store experience teams who would live with whatever we shipped. Store managers who knew things about their buildings that no research plan would have surfaced.
Every one of those groups had a legitimate claim, and a lot of concessions had to be made to work across all of them. That is not a footnote on this project. That was the project. The design was the tractable part. Getting five brands to agree on one thing, and then getting a store's worth of cashiers to sell it at the register, is what made a pilot happen at all.
A wallet that five brands will put in front of their customers beats a better wallet that only one of them will.