How Instacart Reduced Checkout Friction with Microblink

About Instacart

Instacart is a leading grocery technology company that partners with more than 2,200 retail banners, representing nearly 100,000 stores, to transform how people shop for the groceries they need from the retailers they trust. Through the Instacart Marketplace, Instacart Enterprise platform, and Instacart Ads ecosystem, the company powers ecommerce, fulfillment, in-store technology, AI Solutions, and advertising for partners. At this scale, serving millions of customers across the U.S. and Canada, even incremental improvements to the checkout experience translate into meaningful gains for customers and retail partners alike.

Instacart’s Payments Modernization Initiative

Instacart’s Payments Engineering and Product teams are in the midst of a multi-phase payments modernization effort: an investment to enhance the checkout and payment experience. The initiative spans checkout UX, enhanced payment method management, and the reduction of friction at every step of the payment journey. The goal is to make Instacart the most seamless, trusted, and flexible place to shop for groceries; at a scale of nearly 100,000 stores across North America. As part of this initiative, the team identified card-entry friction as a high-impact opportunity.

The Solution: A Deliberate, Architecture-Informed Decision

After evaluating options, Instacart’s Payments Engineering and Product teams selected Microblink’s Identity Intelligence OS based on a clear set of technical and compliance requirements. based on a clear set of technical and compliance requirements. Key among them: the ability to process and route sensitive card data securely without Instacart ever needing to handle or store it directly. Microblink’s Identity Intelligence OS met these requirements out of the box, allowing Instacart to deliver a better checkout experience without expanding its compliance scope or adding operational overhead.

HOW IT WORKS

• Instacart’s engineering team integrated Microblink’s technology directly into the existing payment method management flow — enabling camera-based card capture as an option alongside manual entry.
• Microblink’s on-device ML models handle card recognition in real time, automatically detecting and scanning the card without requiring the customer to align it within a frame or tap a shutter button.
• The result: payment method setup in seconds, estimated at 5x faster than manual entry, with built-in fraud checks running behind the scenes.

TECHNICAL HIGHLIGHTS

• Instacart’s tokenization architecture enabled rapid integration of the Microblink Identity Intelligence OS without expanding PCI scope; a key architectural advantage that made this integration possible at speed.
• The lightweight SDK footprint minimized engineering overhead, allowing the team to move quickly from concept to MVP while preserving capacity for the broader payments roadmap.
• Instacart’s internal design system was applied across the Microblink-powered capture experience, experience, ensuring the feature felt native to the product rather than a bolted-on third-party tool.

Results and Impact

The deployment of Microblink’s Identity Intelligence OS is one component of the broader payments modernization effort, and its results underscore the value of the initiative overall:

• The pilot with Microblink is estimated to drive 10K+ users adding a new credit card each year
• More than 50% of the lift came from early-lifecycle customers: customers still getting familiar with the platform, where reducing friction has the highest impact on long-term retention
• Strong initial results with Microblink’s Identity Intelligence OS justified expanding the experience to more prominent checkout surfaces, accelerating Instacart’s rollout timeline

These results reflect not just the impact not only of Microblink’s Identity Intelligence capabilities, but the compounding effect of Instacart’s broader investment in payments: when checkout is faster, easier, and trustworthy, customers come back for more.

Looking Ahead

Microblink’s Identity Intelligence OS represents one milestone in a longer payments journey. Instacart’s Payments Engineering and Product teams continue to invest in building the payment infrastructure and experience required to serve millions of households across North America.