Turn balances into things people want

Wallets and fintech apps are good at holding value and moving it. They are rarely good at giving it a destination. A balance that sits in an app has one exit most of the time, which is a withdrawal, and every withdrawal is a small loss of engagement. Gift cards give that balance somewhere useful to go, and they keep the user inside your product while it happens.

Why wallets add gift cards

Spending is the moment a wallet earns its place on the home screen. When a user can turn a balance into a grocery card, a streaming subscription or a ride credit in two taps, the balance stops being a number and becomes something they use weekly. That habit is what drives retention, and it is the reason product teams keep asking for a catalog of familiar brands.

Gift cards also work in places a card network does not. A user in a country where your product cannot issue a local card can still buy a card for the supermarket down the street. For wallets with a global audience, that is often the difference between a feature that works in three markets and one that works in dozens.

What you would otherwise build

A credible gift card store is more than a list of logos. It is brand agreements in every country, a way to fulfil orders in seconds, denominations and currencies that match what people actually spend, support for the day a code does not work, and a fraud stack that knows what a stolen payment looks like. Each piece is a small company of its own.

Since 2018, Bidali has been assembling exactly that. The catalog covers 4,700+ brands across 150+ countries, and it reaches your app through a single integration rather than hundreds of separate ones.

How the integration works

There are two ways in. The Commerce SDK is an embeddable storefront for web, iOS, Android and React Native that you can theme to match your product, or run on your own domain. The Gift Card API is for teams that want the catalog and ordering endpoints and would rather design the experience themselves.

Either way, an order is placed against a balance you fund with card, bank transfer or Interac, and the gift card is delivered in the app moments later. Many wallets pair this with Bidali One, which lets a user load a balance once and choose which brand to spend it on later.

Compliance and fraud, handled

Selling gift cards means dealing with sanctions screening, purchase limits, chargebacks and a steady stream of attempts to spend stolen funds. Bidali runs a full compliance program and screens orders for fraud before a card is released, which keeps that work out of your roadmap.

Your own regulatory obligations to your users remain yours. What changes is that the gift card layer arrives with its controls already in place, so your compliance team reviews an integration instead of building a new product line.

Choosing the right launch

Most wallets start with a narrow slice. Pick three or four categories your users already spend on, such as groceries, streaming and ride services, and open the storefront to a single country or user segment. Watch which brands people buy, then widen the catalog once you see the pattern. Because the integration already covers 4,700+ brands, going broader later is a configuration change rather than a new project. Teams that add cash back on day one usually see the strongest early usage, since the reward gives users a reason to try the store the first time.

Making the economics work

Gift cards are one of the few features that can pay for themselves. We share up to 50% of our discount with partners on the cards their users buy, so a storefront can become a revenue line as well as a retention tool. Cash back is a natural fit: you can return part of that margin to the user as a reward, and because the reward is a gift card balance, it is spent rather than withdrawn.

The result is a wallet where balances circulate. Users find things they want, your engagement metrics improve, and you did not have to sign a single brand contract to get there.