SubtleData Seeks To Save Time, Money For mPOS Apps

The old adage “the shortest distance between two points is a straight line,” doesn’t always cast the middlemen in a favorable light. But, in the case of what can be an overcrowded, inefficient point-of-sale market, one middleman could be just the remedy today’s hospitality industry app developers need.

Founded in 2011, platform-as-a-service company SubtleData has created a middleware application that it says will allow app developers to provide a host of consumer and business benefits. SubtleData plans to do this by circumventing the lack of standards in the industry regarding application programming interfaces (APIs), data exchange and data storage.

While this sounds complex, the underlying logic is simpler: by making apps simpler to create, cheaper to build and easier to integrate with POS systems, the variety of available apps grows. This is especially true for processes once too small to demand the investment needed for an app that can be completed more quickly.

For example, the company says apps powered with SubtleData integration can handle payments, manage loyalty services, complete web orders and more. Consumers can enjoy everything from a fresh beer to a hot towel all with the click of a button on their smartphone and companies can prosper with improved analytics.

Still, exactly how SubtleData will usher in this bold new future is perhaps more difficult to immediately understand. As such, PYMNTS.com spoke to CEO Bryan Menell about his company’s solution to find out how exactly it stands to improve payments in the hospitality world.

“One of the things our platform does is, for the first time in hospitality, we actually allow the disintermediation of the order from the payment,” Menell said. “We can actually route payments through other methods. And still settle it back on that point of sale system, along with any other sort of tender types.”

Without this step, Menell says, companies are forced to adopt workarounds that don’t always make for efficient business. For example, he notes that by integrating an app with SubtleData, a businesses that used to take an order on the web, print it out and retype it, could replace all that work with an effective, streamlined solution.

But, the improvements don’t stop there. Menell says that with SubtleData integrated in their apps, businesses will be able to know more about their customers than ever. He notes that apps powered by SubtleData will be able to understand when a client comes in contact with the location and store his or her order history after purchase: an advancement that allows for customized reward programs.

“We’ve discovered that point of sale integration actually makes all the aspects of customer engagement better across all the touchpoints,” said Menell.

Additionally, SubtleData is able to accomplish this through simplified apps. Menell says his organization has built working apps in a matter of minutes, with the goal of showing how SubtleData has “lowered the bar” in terms of the time and resource investment mobile apps require.

“There are companies that have been around for a while that have spent 18 months and $500,00 or more to build just a simple app that works maybe on one point of sale platform… at [SXSW], one of our chief software architects built an app in about 15 minutes, it had 23 lines of code in it, and was a fully featured web and mobile web ordering app that will work on a dozen major point of sales platforms,” Menell says.

So how has SubtleData been received by businesses and consumers? For the full story, listen to the complete podcast below.

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