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Movements in mPoS

  • By Timothy Roberts
  • Friday, July 25, 2014

There are alot of companies competing for your money and looking at ways to innovate at the point of sale. Recently, Amazon have entered the race into the mobile point-of-sale market with a launch of Local Register. Available on of course FireOS, Android, and iOS.

How does Amazon compare to the rest of the market? For the merchant Amazon is providing considerable savings vs. Square & Paypal (for a limited time). For the consumer, the experience appears to the same <yawn>, and security appears to be the same as well as all the others. I would expect an announcement for EMV to follow soon as the market in America transforms to the global secure method of payment.

Also of interest are the other movements in this space. Global giant Verifone that acquired Global Bay in November 2011 has, less than 3 years later, shed itself of the asset to Manhatten Associates. Similar, Ingenico acquired TransferTo in August 2010, formulating a thesis that online services could create the stickiness for their traditional point of sale equipment business to then reversing their decision to sell majority of the business back to the original management group December 2013, a little over 3 years later.

Will we see further shedding of non-core assets from legacy point of sale providers?

The mobile point of sale market just got interesting with Amazon entering into the market.