This is an update on new features and plans ahead between 1 March — 30 May 2020. The goal of this blog post is to provide more business context behind the features. Our technical changelog can be found here.

We are working on maintaining a more readily available public product roadmap. In the meantime, we will continue to share progress via routine blogposts.

Rehive is a platform and toolkit for building fintech apps. We specialize in white-label wallet solutions and make it easy to integrate with third-party service providers whether it is banks, payment processors, KYC-solutions, card issuers, etc.

Check out the latest app features here.

Overview

The top three focus areas at the moment are to support more advanced merchant management features, new payment flows, and integrations with third-party services. We also focused on packaging these new features as predefined solutions for specific business cases to help you get started more easily. We completed the template builder in April — try it here. This saves a lot of upfront configuration time.

We are working towards offering more flexibility to support Business-to-Merchant-to-Customer business models. Currently, only admin level users can manage system configurations, end customers, reward campaigns, notification templates, products, etc. The improvements will enable merchants to have more control to serve their customer needs better.

We are starting to see a trend where merchants and small/medium businesses and marketplaces are becoming the distribution channel for financial products that can help them better retain and serve their customers within a branded wallet solution.

We have also shortlisted integrations that we plan to prioritize over the next 6 months and continuously invest time to iterate on the app designs.

If you are using Rehive directly as a merchant business then these new features won’t be that relevant to you. However, additional integrations and payment flows will be super exciting.

We welcome your feedback and any special features requests.

Accelerated Roadmap, Custom Development, and Integration Engineering

Our approach is to work with our clients to prioritize feature requests that can help their businesses. We maintain an internal roadmap and do our best to shuffle priorities to meet client needs. However, if it is not possible to deliver on the client timeline we do offer a Custom Development, Integration Engineering nd an Accelerated Roadmap Agreement whereby clients can pay to support the development of new features on a guaranteed timeline.

Read more on our Help Center or website about how we help meet special requirements fast.

Sprint Set 2.1 [30 March — 1 May]

In the previous sprint we worked on the following features:

Credit card deposit for prepaid wallets

We’re excited to let you know that we have completed an integration with Stripe. We know that Stripe has strict legal requirements and it is not a guarantee that it will be permitted for all use cases. You can familiarize yourself with the Stripe terms of use here.

You can test the Stripe flow by registering as a user here. Use the test credit card 4242 4242 4242 4242. Here is a demo video of how to add funds using a credit card.

We have received follow up interest from customers and new leads to support Stripe Connect. The primary use case for adding Stripe Connect is to power branded ecosystem wallets for marketplace-based business models. For example, Uber would be able to offer its drivers a dedicated wallet with access to financial products and bank-level payment experiences.

Stripe Connect is also a great solution to directly charge a customer card and process a payout to the receiving merchant without the user having to pay from an existing balance.

An alternative for supporting Stripe Connect is that we allow merchants within a project to connect their own respective Stripe accounts. This would add support for multiple prepaid accounts within a single app and would work great for shopping malls, resorts, and marketplaces.

New flat design look

Our designers have worked hard on a cleaner and more fresh look. It is also possible to configure a global account card list, instead of listing all the available accounts on the home screen.

New side menu and multi-session/app selector

This feature makes it easy to flip between various App IDs on the grey-label app. It is similar to joining different channels on Slack for example. For white-label customers, the selector can be used to stay logged in for multiple accounts.

Streamlined template builder to get started

We currently support a Sandbox, Rewards, and Points Wallet template. It is easy to get started. The template builder has been developed to make it easy to list new solutions.

We have our eye on the following shortlisted templates to get started:

• Prepaid
• Prepaid and rewards
• Transport payments
• Event ticketing and payments
• Peer-to-peer wallet
• Multi-currency wallet
• Store credit wallet
• Food voucher app
• Bitcoin Wallet
• Portfolio manager
• Stellar lumens
• Stellar personal token app
• Stellar Anchor Solution
• Fantasy finance for education

Group registration and configurations

It is now possible to configure public group registration on the web and mobile applications. It is also possible to easily configure the group icons that are automatically updated on the registration page.

New point of sale payment flows

In the last sprint, our designers worked on improved payment flows. The implementation is currently in progress. The first iteration places an emphasis on streamlining the point of sale experience for merchants. The second phase is to improve the online checkout flows too.

The web application will support two flows to create a point of sale invoice:

1. Custom amount makes it convenient to type a total amount for the sale.
2. Production selection makes it easy for merchants to create the point of sale invoice by selecting products from the catalog on the device.

End-users can choose multiple payment methods:

1. Scan to pay
2. Pay with pin
3. Payment request

The first implementation is an improved scan to pay flow. We are in the process of scoping the pin payment flow in the light of supporting digital cash solutions for COVID-19 for aid payouts.

The new design also makes it easier for merchants to print out various QR code formats for specific products or the store as a whole.

Have a look at this sneak peek:

Improved voucher redemption flow for vouchers created by Rehive

Merchants can now redeem vouchers from their devices by scanning or typing the voucher code in their app.

Improvements of transaction switches on the Dashboard

We now have more granular transaction switches based on the group, tier, and subtype. This will make it easier to enforce transaction restrictions on the backend.

Rehive tracking accounts

In the last sprint, we’ve made a breakthrough on how to improve the tracking of external accounts. A tracking account on Rehive is any account that is a 1 to 1 duplication of an external account (a bank account, crypto account etc.). This means that any transaction that happens on the external system/ledger is created on a Rehive account as well.

The tracking account is not directly debited, credited, or interacted with by an admin outside of being updated to reflect external changes to the account. This is to keep it consistent with the value that it represents as possible.

We have now completed the first tracking account improvements on the Rehive Bitcoin Extension which provides the foundations for the Recon Extension to detect any inconsistencies between the ledger systems.

We have written a set of Help Center articles to explain the concept in more detail here.

Sprint Set 2.2 [4 May — 5 June]

The following features are prioritized in the current sprint set at the time of writing this blog post.

Planning and scoping

A big part of the current sprint is planning ahead based on frequent customer requests. If any of these features are important for your business case, please let us know. We would love to get your input.

• Advanced merchant management features with a focus on more granular resource-based permissions on the Rehive Platform.
• User and transaction tag system within the Rehive Platform.
• Shared accounts where multiple users can have access to the same account. This requirement makes sense for merchants and businesses that have multiple staff members with limited permissions.
• Add frontend support for customers to add their own accounts from a public list of accounts.
• Merchant reporting and metrics improvements. The web wallet does not currently have any metrics or insights for merchants. We are looking at existing merchant processing portals to understand what will help merchants manage their businesses and payments better.
• Payment Request Extension will be the next big extension that is planned to support invoicing, improved online checkout, and subscriptions. The extension will be the glue between the conversion and crypto extensions.

Short term roadmap

• Prepaid goods — We are integrating prepaid airtime, data, and electricity in South Africa. This integration will be available as the Flash Extension where clients can get credentials from Flash to offer in-app sales. You might have missed this, but we are already supporting in-app purchases of virtual products for bitcoin via the Bitrefill widget.
• Push notification — Rehive Notifications currently only supports email and SMS notifications. We are adding support for push notifications on the mobile device.
• Chipless Card Extension — This extension will make it easy to link any chipless card to a Rehive enabled account. The feature set is great for hotels, resorts, casinos, and events.
• Point of Sale implementation — We are improving the PoS checkout experience and adding support for more payment flows.
• Dedicated dashboard transaction page — We are moving the transaction page to a dedicated page. This will allow for additional space to better arrange the information and actions.

Merchant management features

We have scoped a more advanced merchant management feature set. We are dividing the improvements into three phases:

1. Firstly, we are adding products and rewards to management features to the web application. This means merchants can manage their own products and rewards that have to be approved by admins.
2. Secondly, we are adding the ability for merchants to create and manage their own customers. These customers will belong to the overall administrator, but merchants will have limited direct management features too.
3. Lastly, we are implementing a merchant-specific reporting page to track sales, fees, customer growth, and more.

Shortlisted integrations

We have identified the following integration partners that we wish to support over the next 6 months. Please let us know if you are interested in a quote to accelerate the implementation or if you have any other providers in mind.

• Onfido
• Plaid
• SynapseFi
• SolarisBank
• Stripe Connect
• Stripe Subscriptions
• Stripe Cards
• Stripe PoS
• Indacoin
• Kraken
• Peach Payments (South Africa)
• Square card processing
• CurrencyCloud
• BitGo
• BitBuy

User stories and illustrations

Lastly, we are making it easier to explain the various payment and transaction flows by creating step by step user stories and illustrations. We will start to publish the first set of How it works flows in the coming week.

Here is a sneak peek for how to receive merchant payments for a static QR code: