The payments industry in the U.S. is evolving fast and merchants across almost every vertical needs to think about incorporating mobile point of sale (mPOS) into their payment strategies. We caught up with payments industry experts to learn how the landscape for mPOS has changed in the last few years and how it can benefit merchants across different verticals.
Watch the video below:
How has the demand for mPOS solutions changed in the past two years?
Jeremy Gumbley, CTO, Creditcall Corporation:
So, we’ve seen a huge uptake in the interest in mPOS over the last two years. Creditcall was one of the earlier pioneers of mPOS back in 2010 where the proposition was strictly for micro-merchants, tier 4 and below. Now, what we’ve seen over the last few years with EMV migration in the US and I think a dramatic re-terminalization and a rethink on terminal technology, we started to see that mPOS is more in demand because a lot of these platforms are open systems. It’s easy to install new functionality on them because you can just download that functionality from the App store. So, we’re seeing a big uptake in demand for mPOS in the last few years. I think it’s because tablets have a form factor which people understand, whether they be merchants or whether they be consumers of those merchants. People almost intuitively understand how to use a tablet over some other kind of device. Because it is such a flexible open system, there are a lot more options on how to deploy this technology and the kinds of options of that new technology provides.
When do you expect to see broader adoption of mPOS across merchant tiers?
Rob Cameron, Chief Product Officer, Moneris Solutions:
We anticipate that by 2019, around half of our customers are going to be using mPOS as part of the ecosystem. In the small-medium, it’s going to be an iPad at the front of the store to run their store that they can pick up and move with the customer when required. For the big merchants, it’s going to take longer so we’ll see them extending their point of sale out and doing things like being able to have a wired physical point of sale but then also be able to service the customers where they are with an mPOS-enabled terminal and device. But ultimately, I think we will move towards this Apple store experience where there is no cash register in a lot more retailers over the next number of years. What we see quantitatively from the numbers is new customers into our business - is trending as high as 40% - are requesting a solution connected to an iPad or a smartphone and that’s a huge difference from two years ago when it would be some 5%. So the momentum suggests that we will achieve that 50% by 2019
What industries or market segments can benefit the most from mPOS?
Jeremy Gumbley, CTO, Creditcall Corporation:
So where we’ve seen mPOS being more widely adopted should we say – well, one of the categories is quick service restaurants and queue busting. Where you have a quick service restaurant which has a large queue at peak times. Rather than putting more staff on the cash registers, you can actually have somebody walking up and down the line taking orders, transmitting those orders to the kitchen rather than facing the issue of line abandonment where people say “Well, it’s probably going to take me a lot longer than I have so I’m going to leave the line.”
Jordan McKee, Senior Analyst, Payments, 451 Research:
I think one of the interesting this we've noticed about mobile point of sale is that it continues to permeate new verticals. Verticals that we wouldn't have even associated with perhaps card payments two or three years ago. So we're starting to see mPOS permeate all verticals and really all company sizes which is very exciting. As I alluded to, I think the Enterprise is going to be a very big opportunity particularly in the retail segment. We're starting to see a lot of retailers really refocus their efforts around in-store engagement with mPOS being the primary vehicle to do so. I think hospitality is also going to be very hot particularly the hotel industry. I think we're going to see quite a bit of work in the mPOS sector oriented around hotels and things like, line busting, things like, accepting payments in a room, accepting payments in a restaurant. Those are going to be pertinent use cases over the next few quarters.
Rob Cameron, Chief Product Officer, Moneris Solutions:
I think that all areas can benefit. It’s a lighter footprint from a training – staff training standpoint, it’s quicker training because they’re familiar with the nuances of how to use an iPad and it’s mobile but I think some of the big winners are where you actually use the device to better your business. If you’re just repeating what you used to do on a big, heavy system on a lighter system, you haven’t embraced the mobility, so I think a restaurant example is a great one where you can see someone with an iPad mini walking around a table of eight and they put in the drink order for the first two people and it goes to the bar and then a runner shows up while they’re still at the table taking all the other orders and starts delivering drinks and so that’s a better consumer experience which we look for but also for the restaurants, they could turn tables quicker, increase revenue, and then for the waiter or waitress, it drives higher tips. So everybody wins because you’ve used the mobility aspect. You just haven’t replaced one with the equivalent on another and I think that’s where you’ll see the big win from mPOS.
