Datacap Finds POS and the Restaurant Industry Appetizing

Datacap can trace its roots back a few decades, to the early 1980s, where it started life as a manufacturer of some of the first cash registers with integrated payments.  And through the years since that beginning, the company has grown well beyond the scope of cash registers to become a software/hardware company focused on providing integrated payment solutions to Point of Sale ISVs.

The age of “stand-aside” systems, with multiple points of entry for data (and lots of chances to get data coding wrong or to even lose important information altogether) are perhaps numbered, as merchants look for streamlined integrated POS technology.

Among the key attractions in integrated payments lies the fact that all aspects of the buying and checkout process are consolidated, so data is captured and stored efficiently and securely with ever-evolving security technology including encryption, tokenization and EMV.

Datacap develops the interfaces that power PC-based, embedded and, more recently through a number of partnerships with hardware and software peers, mobile point of sale systems.  The Datacap interface is flexible, which means that a merchant using the company’s platform can scale payment options at any time – adding, for example, the ability to accept debit cards, or payment via mobile devices.  Thus, as a merchant’s business grows, so can the scope of its payments processing, as the situation warrants and as technology evolves.  Datacap’s middleware is sold exclusively through authorized resellers, and typically those resellers offer their end customers installation, and continued support services once installation is complete.

Given the far-flung business activities in a busy restaurant –with servers flitting among tables of guests, juggling orders, checks, cash, cards, and even mobile devices – it makes sense that an integrated system would be attractive to a small or mid-sized eatery.

And in an example of a partnership that speaks to the scalability of its POS middleware, Datacap provides payments functionality for Points of Success, a POS company that specializes in feature-rich, lower cost systems geared toward restaurants and bars.

Datacap’s out-of-scope payment interfaces provide instant support for a variety of POS hardware, including EMV-ready PIN Pads with NFC (contactless payments) functionality.  EMV is perhaps most important to the near term as the U.S. moves ever closer to the October 2015 compliance deadline.  And, as has been widely reported, in the U.S., most merchants are moving quite slowly, if at all, to adapt operations to be in compliance.  Recent research claims that fewer than half of POS terminals in the U.S. will be EMV-capable even by the end of the year.

In terms of NFC, that technology is seeing wider adoption globally, and Semco Research said recently that NFC growth across all devices – ranging from mobile technology, wearables, and even cars – will be marked by compound annual growth rates of as much as 15 percent through the next several years, to 23 billion units in 2020.

In an interview with Jeff Ward,  CEO at Inborne Technology, and creator of Point of Success, said that the overarching themes driving POS technology include playing “a supporting role in restaurant reinvention” in which innovators can “do what they do best – creating new food experiences and building welcoming food environments.”  And for some environments, flexibility within the payment experience – across the spectrum of consumer to a restaurant’s inventory, and even accounting function — is paramount.

Ward notes that the partnership with Datacap enables payment across a wide variety of devices, and payment processing extends across all processors, including Point of Success’ primary partner, Mercury Payments.  Like many other processors, Mercury, which is a Vantiv company, focuses on small and midsized businesses, and offers Datacap’s full line of integrated payments solutions through flexible ‘Solution-as-a-Service’ programs that provide on-going recurring revenue to the POS provider.

Datacap says that its technology offers a path forward for POS providers looking to evolve with market trends and industry standards without requiring onerous on-going development or certifications on the part of the POS developer. One, out-of-scope integration provides support for virtually all US processors, a growing stable of hardware and POS peripherals, security-centric payments and the ability to send transaction-level data to multiple back-ends – consistently adding value to the POS offering.

Features that tie in with high turnover  that mark the daily operations, of say, a pizzeria, include rapid order entry, cost control and even delivery information. “Integrated credit card processing with support for current technology is key to meeting these and other objectives,” says Ward.  One other factor in choosing Datacap, according to the executive, comes as the requirement for PA-DSS assessment (that is, the global security standard created by the Payment Card Industry Security Standards Council) was eliminated via the use of Datacap technology – feature that “saved us a huge amount of time that we’ve used to focus on additional software features that benefit our customers and our company.”