Why the innovation at the merchant POS level is a major one happening

It unifies the payment experience from multiple methods, connects loyalty and payment and is focussed on mobile

Apple Pay could have been a major payment innovation right from the very beginning when it launched in 2014 and premiered in major geographies in 2015–2017: but it is still lagging in a number of those where Apple originally tried to disrupt the peace-meal fashion of paying with cash, magstripe cards, QR codes, a range of mobile proximity wallets.

Often the conundrum of payment creates a fallback to cash payment, turning the relentless innovation drive of making yet another one of those trinkets into an impediment to cashless-ness: popular merchants have to carry an arsenal of devices to connect with a whim of a buyer.

It is about to end. Or rather it should with merchant POS innovation.

Originally focussed on broadening the field of card acceptance, those card POS innovators savvy to not burn the totality of investors money in the spiral of discounting acceptance fees pivoted to offer a new solution to address:

• The growing demand to pay with mobile trough a range of applications (in-app payment);
• The need to get feedback on mobile irrespective to whether one taps with a card or with his or her device;
• The pain of hardware operation for uniformity, efficiency and maintenance costs;
• The need from merchant to integrate loyalty with payment since fees no longer rationalize the fact of payment as they support the chance of return sales.

So a number of merchant POS automation platforms are hard at work to give merchants the simplicity of operation, the robustness of value-added services — and ultimately the cost of running their sales.

It is also about data:

Offering a PaaS / SaaS is not all about rent from merchants using the platform, but creating a data-play about the aggregated info on footfall, and user preferences — if this is negotiated and properly enacted in the user-experience, given that no user-identifiable information can escape the domain without prior consent of the user.

Hardly the Big Brother approach will be seen favorably, yet running algorithms for small merchants to compete against big retailers through networked intelligence is one opportunity.