iPad-Based POS Customer Base Skyrockets

Intelligent Point of Sale, an iPad-based payment services company from Scotland, announced Feb. 17 in a press release that its user base grew by 200 percent in 2014, with more than 500 unique outlets supported across Great Britain, as the company seeks to expand its operations and grow its staff for 2015.

A self-funded startup that was founded in 2012, the company was one of the first in the U.K. to market an iPad-based payment system, geared toward the country’s retail and hospitality industries, because of the backgrounds of its founders. It sells its cloud-based POS technology on the App store for download, which comes with full Verifone and Xero integration for payment processing. Unlike other tablet-based POS systems though, Intelligent’s system can handle payments while offline, which can be an important facet when its current client base includes outdoor retailers like festival operator Underbelly, the largest of its kind in Britain.

The program is written in Objective-C and is hosted on Fortrabbit php hosting platform, which, according to Intelligent Point of Sale Limited Director Robin Knox, was meant for longevity and reliability:

“We decided to write the app natively in Objective-C in order to focus on usability. It became a realisation that writing the application in a non-native language would make it run too sluggishly for the fast-paced environments intelligentpos® is intended to be used in,” said Knox.

Aside from payments, Intelligent POS also integrates loyalty programs based on tokenized payments and “barcoded key fobs,” a streamlined method of rewarding customers that has become a concern for retailers as online shopping and mobile wallets take off, according to various industry surveys.

The company also announced that it will prepare a major fundraising round in 2015, as it looks to expand its office beyond its 14 workers as well as expand its operations globally with additional licensing agreements. So far, its major non-U.K. partner is Canadian coffee chain Second Cup, which is expanding into the U.K. Despite the growth, Knox said she wants to keep the business at home in Edinburgh, rather than outsourcing functions like seven-day customer service.

“Outsourcing our services has never appealed to our business as customer satisfaction is what keeps us moving forward as a business,” she noted.