O-079 Team Baklava - Project Instacard

A simple and quick way to issue credit cards for pilgrims

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The story

It's hard for many pilgrims coming from abroad to carry their money during Hajj trips (for convenience or security reasons) and issuing valid credit cards from their countries is an option that might not be available, incompatible with local providers, or is a process that that takes a long time. With Instacard we allow Hajj campaigns to issue prepaid credit cards for their clients, and pilgrims can immediately pick them up through the campaigns as soon as they arrive to Saudi Arabia.

Inspiration

  • Helping pilgrims who don't want to carry cash, for both convenience and security.
  • Helping to increase adoption of modern payment methods.

What it does

It issues prepaid physical credit cards through (Marqeta's API) for pilgrims. Pilgrims can acquire the cards through Hajj campaigns.

Existing code before the hackathon

All our core business features and logic have been built during the hackathon.

We don't have existing code before the Hackathon, we use the following APIs Amazon Web Services and Marqeta API.

We built a Marqeta API wrapper in Ruby that's written from scratch but heavily inspired from https://github.com/aamarill/marqeta

What has been created during the hackathon

The whole project, other than the APIs we used above.

These are the currently working features:

  • Campaign registration.
  • Login (as a campaign).
  • Issuing (virtual) credit cards through Marqeta's API.
  • Customizing credit card backgrounds.
  • Prototype of topping up credit card balances.

What's next for Instacard

  • Partnering with Hajj campaigns, government entities, and local services to enable pilgrims to benefit from it.
  • Sharing (anonymized) pilgrim credit card ownership data so entities can benefit from it (e.g. a brand could benefit to know that citizens of a certain country highly prefer Instacard to other payment methods, and create custom-tailored ads for them)
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