Home Depot has already made its share of bold payments plays. The company invested in mobile point-of-sale technology back in 2010, and more recently partnered with PayPal to bring the “empty hands” form factor to all of its registers.

So what are the important factors Home Depot looks at before making a payments decision? And what do those factors say about where Home Depot might be headed at the point of sale in the near future?

We asked Stephen Holmes, senior manager of corporate communications for the home improvement retailer, to go over some of those factors with us, and to talk about the technologies that his company thinks has the biggest impact on doing business.

Mobile point-of-sale technology and the PayPal partnership make their way into the conversation, but so does a more basic payment technology that seems to be dividing retailers into two separate camps: self-checkout. Himself a huge fan of the option, Holmes says Home Depot research has found that one in three shoppers prefer self-checkout to any other payment experience available.

Home Depot has already made its share of bold payments plays. The company invested in mobile point-of-sale technology back in 2010, and more recently partnered with PayPal to bring the “empty hands” form factor to all of its registers.

So what are the important factors Home Depot looks at before making a payments decision? And what do those factors say about where Home Depot might be headed at the point of sale in the near future?

We asked Stephen Holmes, senior manager of corporate communications for the home improvement retailer, to go over some of those factors with us, and to talk about the technologies that his company thinks has the biggest impact on doing business.

Mobile point-of-sale technology and the PayPal partnership make their way into the conversation, but so does a more basic payment technology that seems to be dividing retailers into two separate camps: self-checkout. Himself a huge fan of the option, Holmes says Home Depot research has found that one in three shoppers prefer self-checkout to any other payment experience available.

Listen to the full audio interview with Home Depot’s Stephen Holmes here.

The Home Depot

Founded in 1978, The Home Depot, Inc. is the world’s largest home improvement specialty retailer with fiscal 2011 retail sales of $70.4 billion and earnings of $3.9 billion. The Home Depot has more than 2,200 retail stores in the United States (including Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands and the territory of Guam), Canada, Mexico and China. The Home Depot’s stock is traded on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE: HD) and is included in the Dow Jones industrial average and Standard & Poor’s 500 index.