Is mPOS the Missing Piece to the Omnichannel Puzzle?

While omnichannel remains an important focus of most retailers, most merchants say they lack the capabilities to support it. Yet most have plans to implement mPOS by 2016. Why? Because they view it as an enabler to the biggest merchant initiative of this decade: omnichannel. Yep. We know what you’re thinking. Further proof that as important as card acceptance is, merchants big and small want an mPOS solution that does much more. This month’s mPOS Tracker will bring you up speed on who moved up in the rankings given their focus on advancing retailers’ omnichannel ambitions.

 

Welcome to the new monthly mPOS Tracker, a PYMNTS Special Report sponsored by ROAM. In this report, we rank the players that we track, and score these players based on numbers and types of devices used, geographies where solutions are implemented, the number of payment types accepted, and more.

This month’s report highlights a recent study of small businesses in the UK that shows that only 2 percent of micromerchants in the UK use mPOS to accept payments. Even SMBs in fast food, specialty retail, and food service sectors with fewer than 9 employees say that they have not embraced mPOS – and 45 percent of these SMBs identify cash flow as the biggest barrier to growth.

Payment acceptance is important in helping SMBs grow, but other capabilities like CRM, inventory management, marketing and promotional campaign plug-ins and more are also essential to ensuring their business runs efficiently and effectively. The evolution of mPOS, therefore, is enabling commerce platforms that allow SMBs to “recognize, reward and serve their customers” as do the larger players.

Omnichannel, too, is enabled by mPOS, and continues to be a top focus among most retailers even though 78 percent of all retailers believe that they lack the capabilities to support omnichannel today. But retailers like UnderArmour are experimenting with mPOS to enable “checkout” anywhere in the store just before the back-to-school time of year.

Those who scored the highest this month were those whose platforms enable a variety of capabilities and functionalities – they have the greatest ability to support many retailers and fully monetize the mPOS ecosystem. Those players are PayPal Here, Kalixa Pro, Go Pago, Flint, Payleven, Vexilor from Givex, CreditCall, and ROAM. We also saw five new players join the mPOS pyramid: Epic, Netswipe, Paymax, Sacombank, and Sr. Pago.


Here are the three key takeaways for this month:

1) No more one-trick mPOS Ponies. All merchants, even SMBs want mPOS solutions to do more for them than enable card payments.

2) mPOS is a bridge to omnichannel. As retailers enable sales associates to interact with customers anywhere in store, and over time, will enable them to serve up personalized experiences and even recognize loyal/preferred customers in store.

3) Focus on emerging markets. As issuers push to expand card acceptance in emerging markets, like the Philippines and Vietnam, mPOS players are riding their draft to enable card acceptance via the mobile device.

 

For a more detailed look at the ratings and rankings, click the download button below for a full copy of this month’s report.

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View past mPOS Tracker reports by clicking here

 


THE MPOS PYRAMID JULY 2014

mPOS Tracker Pyramid_July 2014_600w_x_710_h

Information about these players is available in varying degrees of completeness. Details about volumes and shipments – the information that everyone finds most valuable – is not publicly available. We plan to update this report on a monthly basis to include new entrants, and updates on the players profiled in the prior month’s report. We are also in the process of compiling and will report out aggregated information about shipments and volumes. We encourage you to contact us at mobilepos@pymnts.com if you would like to be included in this report and/or would like us to update your information as we have presented it.