How we created zero-click ideal payment with bunq

In the weekend of 1st of september bunq organised a hackathon.

Four members of the Appronto team attended this hackathon to create a solution in Mendix.

We brainstormed about problems that we experience nowadays with banking and came up with ideas how to make banking more fun, simple or faster.

The challenge we set for our team was to simplify the way of handling iDeal payments in your computer’s browser.

The current process of starting a webshop payment/donation is:

1. The user is shown a qr code
2. Find and unlock your phone
3. Open the bunq app
4. Choose the QR scanner
5. Aim and focus the camera on the code
6. Approve your payment
   

What we built is a product that reduces the amount of steps to ZERO ??

The features we built for this MVP (Minimum Viable Product):

1. Connect your bunq account to the app to allow exchange of the API key
2. Set a personal limit for automatic approval (transactions with a higher payment amount than your personal limit will require manually scanning the QR code as usual).
3. Capture the QR code and create a payment
4. Automatically approve the payment
5. Have your phone dialed when you can’t find it
6. Redirect after a couple of seconds after the payment is done

We built a Mendix app that uses the bunq SDK to communicate with the bunq API. Business logic was created in the Mendix app for handling the setup of your bunq account, the checks for the personal limit and the integration with the telecommunication partner to actually call a mobile device.

The logic is exposed through REST API’s which are accessible to the browser extension to consume. This browser extension (which we also built ourselves) is a lightweight piece of code (roughly 100 lines) that took care of the injection of a part of the Mendix app. This way we were able to create, modify and deploy changes quickly and in a low code way.

The result is stunning and got us high fives ?? from bunq’s CEO Ali Niknam, so we definitely created a WOW reaction!

Our solution is published on the Together Forum of bunq (a place many bunq users visit often) and we already received a lot of positive feedback.

Unfortunately we didn’t win first prize of the hackathon but we won the audience award !!!!! 

Thanks for the support!

See our demo for yourself (in production with real money! ?) on Youtube