Pizza Hut has partnered with Visa and Accenture to develop a connected car and on-the-go ordering experience.
The connected car will be equipped with cellular connectivity, online payment service Visa Checkout and Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE). Pizza Hut restaurants will also deploy beacon technology to recognize and engage with the connected car as it approaches. Accenture will manage the integration of the technologies.
“We’re committed to offering speed and convenience to our customers when ordering online and this new connected car technology is the latest way for us to do that,” said Baron Concors, Chief Digital Officer for Pizza Hut. “We have the largest suite of mobile apps and are proud to be the exclusive pizza company to offer Visa Checkout. With our history of innovation, it only made sense for us to be the first to test the beacon technology in cars.”
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Visa first demonstrated the connected car commerce experience at the Mobile World Congress, which was held March 2-5, 2015, in Barcelona, Spain. The partners expect to test the experience in Northern California over a three-month period, starting in spring 2015.
“By 2020 it is estimated that more than 250 million vehicles worldwide will include some form of embedded connectivity,” said Bill Gajda, SVP of Innovation and Strategic Partnerships at Visa. “As the number of connected cars on the road increases, so does our ability to bring secure online commerce to consumers everywhere. We initially focused on a specific use case — ordering a meal on your way home — but we envision a world where consumers can seamlessly make many of their everyday purchases from the car.”
