MishiPay Gains 20 More Airports As It Takes On ‘Just Walk Out’ From Amazon

Travel retailer Paradies Lagardère will have more than 20 stores in airports around the U.S. and Canada deploying MishiPay’s mobile self-checkout technology in time for Christmas and the expected surge in holiday traffic.

The UK-based technology company’s in-house developed Scan, Pay & Go system has been selected by Paradies—part of the second-biggest airport retailer in the world Lagardère Travel Retail—after a successful test at two locations, Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood Airport in Florida and Charlotte Douglas Airport, in North Carolina.

The airport rollout includes some key hubs with high footfall such as Atlanta, Dallas-Fort Worth, Los Angeles and Phoenix Sky Harbor, plus Vancouver and Toronto airports in Canada. A total of 26 Paradies stores will offer MishiPay from an estate of more than 950, including restaurants, in about 100 airports. Gregg Paradies, president and CEO at Paradies Lagardère, described the current expansion as “phase two” suggesting that further openings were possible.

The decision to expand was based on several factors including customer satisfaction levels in the test stores. They averaged 4.85 out of 5, with over 90% of shoppers making a purchase when they opened the app.

MishiPay and Amazon vie for airport retail

From a retailer’s viewpoint, payment services like MishiPay and Amazon’s ‘Just Walk Out’ set-up also allow store associates to be deployed in roles other than manning cash registers. For example being freed up to assist customers in making products choices can help to increase basket sizes, a selling point that Amazon has flagged up.

There are differences too. MishiPay’s contactless solution is not hardware heavy, like Amazon’s, which is also being deployed in some airport locations with, for example, Dufry-owned Hudson. It does not require infrastructure to be added in-store; shoppers just scan a QR code, or enter a URL into their smartphone browser, both of which identify the store location and inventory. Users then scan the barcodes of the products they want to buy and pay with Apple Pay, Google Pay or other payment methods including credit cards.

Co-founders, CEO Mustafa Khanwala, and chief technology officer Tanvi Bhardwa were both selected as Forbes 30 Under 30 entrepreneurs to watch in 2019, thanks to the development of their proprietary mobile self-checkout solution for brick-and-mortar stores.

“The checkout in the shoppers pocket”

Khanwala, told me: “MishiPay puts the checkout in the shoppers pocket. Unlike camera based technologies [a reference to Amazon], we work with retailers without requiring them to change anything about their existing hardware or software. We enable shoppers to engage in an instantly accessible journey that continues outside the store, with additional functionality like Click & Collect, and item discovery.”

The tech startup, launched in 2014 has expanded relatively fast in domestic retail, partnering with some big names like Muji, fashion chain Mango, Decathlon Netherlands and, earlier this year, Flying Tiger in 30 locations in the Nordics.

Environmental angle covered

Most recently, MishiPay also entered the grocery segment, partnering with organic-led, zero waste Nude Foods Market in Boulder, Colorado, another mission-led startup, to become the primary method of checkout in its first physical store.

Nude Foods Market co-founder Verity Noble said: “We hate waste of all types. Conventional checkout tech consists of lots of wasteful plastics, paper and inks. We have cut out the need for hardware, creating a checkout experience that is good for the environment, for shoppers, and for our daily store operations.”

To date, MishiPay has secured almost $13 million in venture capital funding from American Express, Nauta Capital, and Commerce Ventures among others. The last Series A funding round was closed in 2019 for $4.7 million.