POS Providers Compete To Be Restaurants’ One-Stop Shop

The name point of sale (POS) may suggest a single step of the process, but restaurant POS providers are going well beyond the moment of payment. On Tuesday (Aug. 3), FinTech and payments company Fiserv’s Clover POS system announced the launch of Clover Station Solo, a device that seeks to consolidate front and back of house operations. At the same time, cloud-based POS system Appetize announced Appetize Plus, which lumps the company’s software, hardware, and payments tools into a single subscription, enabling businesses to upgrade their technology without the often-prohibitive cost of purchasing each upfront.

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“Appetize Plus is a game changer for our enterprise customer base since, historically, businesses are known to save for years to upgrade their POS systems,” Appetize Chief Strategy Officer and Co-Founder Kevin Anderson said in a statement. He added that the subscription plan allows businesses to immediately “reap all the benefits of a faster, easier-to-use system,” and offers the “peace of mind” of “knowing they will always have the most up-to-date technology.”

As restaurants continue to upgrade their technology, whether it be to stay ahead of the curve or to play catch-up, the market for cloud-based solutions continues to grow. A report from Grand View Research finds that the global restaurant POS terminal market size was $15.5 billion in 2020 and that the demand for mobile POS terminals is going to grow more than 5 percent each year through 2028. Companies that can go beyond credit card processing, tying payment features to a suite of connected services like Clover and Appetize are doing, have the opportunity to become indispensable to restaurants.

One POS system that could take hold in years to come is Olo Pay, a payment processing tool from digital ordering and delivery software provider Olo, which is expected to go to market in 2023.

“[Olo Pay] is our effort to have an Olo payments offering as a component of our product modules, such that things like mobile wallet, things like chargeback and fraud protection, are built into the offering,” Olo Founder and CEO Noah Glass told Karen Webster. Given the company’s wide range of offerings, and its existing partnerships with dozens of leading restaurant chains, the feature could quickly become a major player among POS providers aiming to be restaurants’ one-stop shop.

Read more: Olo’s Noah Glass On Powering The $1.6 Trillion ‘Eats’ Ecosystem

The space grows more competitive every week. In mid-July, hospitality-focused POS provider Squirrel Systems announced Squirrel Cloud POS Independent Restaurant Edition, which in addition to consolidating ordering across channels and payment processing, also aims to ease independent restaurants’ labor struggles by allowing waitstaff to send orders to the kitchen from wherever they are in the restaurant, maximizing the time they can spend with customers.

The following week, hospitality tech startup Bbot announced a $15 million Series A fundraise, bringing its total funding to $22.3 million, to build out its eCommerce platform, which integrates with POS systems and also offers hardware and software for contactless ordering and loyalty rewards.

See also: How Consumers Live In The Connected Economy

By using point-of-sale technology as an entry point into a broader suite of features, all of these ResTech companies are finding ways to deepen their relationships with restaurants, offering restaurants access to a range of connected digital experiences and becoming essential to their customers in today’s connected economy.