When The POS Is The OS

It may be easy to see First Data’s SMB POS Clover sitting on a merchant’s countertop and assume it’s just another nice-looking terminal that accepts payments.

But as John Beatty, CEO and cofounder of Clover for First Data, explained, that would be overlooking what Clover really is — an operating platform that helps an SMB run its business, eliminating the need for the SMB to have multiple devices on the countertop that support other business-critical applications.

“We’re starting to see a lot of device proliferation. Merchants just run out of counter space at some point. It’s expensive, it takes up a lot of room and it’s not integrated,” Beatty noted.

Though Clover serves the essential need of allowing a merchant to accept and process a payment, it also is able to support a number of applications — some related to payments, like loyalty and rewards, while others are related purely to the efficient operation of an SMB. This enables a merchant to run the applications that they need without having to support multiple different devices and environments to do so.

“Our idea is to bring all of those solutions to the Clover app market to allow one platform, one integrated experience to serve all of those needs.”

Taking On The EMV Plight

Though the liability shift and deployment of EMV in the U.S. market hasn’t been the easiest road for any merchant, it has brought about unique challenges and issues for SMBs.

“We know that the EMV transition has been sort of rough, but we think it doesn’t have to be that rough,” Beatty said.

Twenty seconds doesn’t feel like a long time in most cases, but when a customer is in the checkout line waiting for the payment terminal to accept a chip-enabled transaction, it can feel like an eternity. The slow speeds of EMV transactions have been a major complaint for both merchants and consumers, which is why so many payments players are working to tackle the problem and bring down transaction wait times.

First Data has been working to reduce the speed of EMV payments to little as three seconds or less on Clover devices.

There are a few things, he said, that have contributed to what can feel like crawling transaction speeds when it comes to EMV. Slow speeds can be caused by merchants still using solutions on dial-up connections — believe it or not — the use of old terminals that have slow cryptographic engines and merchants not focusing on connection management between the device and the payment processing gateway.

Beatty explained that, if merchants don’t have a modern architecture on the server side, it’s too expensive to have hundreds of thousands or millions of payments devices constantly connected to those servers at all times.

Business Efficiency From The POS

First Data’s Clover App Market, which currently offers more than 200 applications, serves as a place to access the features and functions that help to round out the capabilities of Clover.

“Our idea was always that a single point-of-sale system can’t possibly build every feature and function necessary for every small business,” Beatty said. “There’s just too many different types of small businesses and too many market geographies to possibly serve every need well.”

The Homebase App for Clover, which provides staff management capabilities, was one of First Data’s early partners in the app marketplace and turns every Clover device into an employee time clock that can track who the employee is, when they clock in and out and allow shift management functions.

The marketplace, Beatty noted, also serves as an easier way for merchants to adopt new products and makes it easier for the app developers to get distribution of their products to merchants.

“It’s about bringing it all onto a single device for a single integrated experience,” Beatty said.