Verifone Developer
Yesterday Verifone announced a next generation family of payment devices, called Verifone Engage. Verifone promises to wrap more value around the merchant-consumer interaction at the point-of-purchase with new personalized marketing features, pay-with-points and rewards. In addition, they introduced an expanded Verifone Commerce Platform giving developers the tools to publish POS apps to a new App Marketplace for merchants. They Linux based devices will provide an accessible and well-known framework for developers to innovate upon. Software based solutions are transforming the industry and Verifone risked getting commoditized as a hardware vendor if it didn’t act by building a platform and marketplace for developers.
What does this mean for the rest of the Payments Industry? Two stakeholders in particular will be impacted.
POS Developers (ISVs) – Engage is a good development for the POS developer community and merchants. The whole mission of a POS is to improve the customer experience at the point of purchase and streamline back-office processes for the merchant. ISVs could integrate with Engage hardware and offer merchants more services through the Verifone App Marketplace, publish apps of their own, and potentially earn new residual revenue sources from merchants paying to use those applications.
- Processors could potentially choose to enable ISVs to integrate to them via the Verifone Commerce Platform creating a more seamless “commerce” integration experience. They do this today to a certain degree through Verifone Point, but the Verifone Commerce Platform promises to enable much more. This would be a potential boon for Verifone and ease the burden of multiple integrations for ISVs allowing them to focus on their core business of POS development. Payment gateways or processors could have apps in the marketplace enabling merchants to sign up for payment processing creating a more frictionless on-boarding experience.
